Related papers: Preference Learning in School Choice Problems

The school choice problem concerns the design and implementation of matching mechanisms that produce school assignments for students within a given public school district. In this note we define a simple student-optimal criterion that is…

I study costly information acquisition in a two-sided matching problem, such as matching applicants to schools. An applicant's utility is a sum of common and idiosyncratic components. The idiosyncratic component is unknown to the applicant…

An agent acquires a costly flexible signal before making a decision. We explore to what degree knowledge of the agent's information costs helps predict her behavior. We establish an impossibility result: learning costs alone generate no…

In many machine learning applications, there are multiple decision-makers involved, both automated and human. The interaction between these agents often goes unaddressed in algorithmic development. In this work, we explore a simple version…

We study the role of correlation in matching markets, where multiple decision-makers simultaneously face selection problems from the same pool of candidates. We propose a model in which a candidate's priority scores across different…

This paper introduces a novel revealed-preference approach to ranking colleges and professional schools based on applicants' choices and standardized test scores. Unlike traditional rankings that rely on data supplied by institutions or…

Public school districts across the United States have implemented school choice systems that have the potential to improve underserved students' access to educational opportunities. However, research has shown that learning about and…

In considering the college admissions problem, almost fifty years ago, Gale and Shapley came up with a simple abstraction based on preferences of students and colleges. They introduced the concept of stability and optimality; and proposed…

Addressing the large inefficiencies generated by the Deferred Acceptance (DA) mechanism requires priority violations, but which ones are justifiable? The leading approach is to ask individuals if they consent to waive their priority…

I propose a treatment selection model that introduces unobserved heterogeneity in both choice sets and preferences to evaluate the average effects of a program offer. I show how to exploit the model structure to define parameters capturing…

We study the role of information and access in capacity-constrained selection problems with fairness concerns. We develop a statistical discrimination framework, where each applicant has multiple features and is potentially strategic. The…

Many U.S. colleges now use test-optional admissions. A frequent claim is that by not seeing standardized test scores, a college can admit a student body it prefers, say with more diversity. But how can observing less information improve…

We examine the problem of assigning teachers to public schools over time when teachers have tenured positions and can work simultaneously in multiple schools. To do this, we investigate a dynamic many-to-many school choice problem where…

Social choice has become a foundational component of modern machine learning systems. From auctions and resource allocation to the alignment of large generative models, machine learning pipelines increasingly aggregate heterogeneous…

School choice mechanism designers use discrete choice models to understand and predict families' preferences. The most widely-used choice model, the multinomial logit (MNL), is linear in school and/or household attributes. While the model…

Students' decisions on whether to take a class are strongly affected by whether their friends plan to take the class with them. A student may prefer to be assigned to a course they likes less, just to be with their friends, rather than…

A run of the deferred acceptance (DA) algorithm may contain proposals that are sure to be rejected. We introduce the accelerated deferred acceptance algorithm that proceeds in a similar manner to DA but with sure-to-be rejected proposals…

When does society eventually learn the truth, or take the correct action, via observational learning? In a general model of sequential learning over social networks, we identify a simple condition for learning dubbed excludability.…

Two-sided matching markets have long existed to pair agents in the absence of regulated exchanges. A common example is school choice, where a matching mechanism uses student and school preferences to assign students to schools. In such…

Policy learning algorithms are widely used in areas such as personalized medicine and advertising to develop individualized treatment regimes. However, most methods force a decision even when predictions are uncertain, which is risky in…