Related papers: Playing the system: address manipulation and acces…
Recently dozens of school districts and college admissions systems around the world have reformed their admission rules. As a main motivation for these reforms the policymakers cited strategic flaws of the rules: students had strong…
Student dropout is a significant concern for educational institutions due to its social and economic impact, driving the need for risk prediction systems to identify at-risk students before enrollment. We explore the accuracy of such…
Each year, selective American colleges sort through tens of thousands of applications to identify a first-year class that displays both academic merit and diversity. In the 2023-2024 admissions cycle, these colleges faced unprecedented…
We study how the design of admissions policies affects the ability of students admitted to universities. In our model, applicants have a multi-dimensional ability, which is a combination of a "type" and a "soft skill." Universities may…
When consequential decisions are informed by algorithmic input, individuals may feel compelled to alter their behavior in order to gain a system's approval. Models of agent responsiveness, termed "strategic manipulation," analyze the…
In this paper, we study university admissions under a centralized system that uses grades and standardized test scores to match applicants to university programs. We consider affirmative action policies that seek to increase the number of…
Recently, many matching systems around the world have been reformed. These reforms responded to objections that the matching mechanisms in use were unfair and manipulable. Surprisingly, the mechanisms remained unfair even after the reforms:…
In the medical residency matching markets of the U.S. and Japan, we observe that an applicant's probability of matching with their first-listed program is disproportionately higher than that of matching with their second-listed program,…
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…
This chapter surveys the application of matching theory to school choice, motivated by the shift from neighborhood assignment systems to choice-based models. Since educational choice is not mediated by price, the design of allocation…
A fundamental component in the theoretical school choice literature is the problem a student faces in deciding which schools to apply to. Recent models have considered a set of schools of different selectiveness and a student who is unsure…
Strategic classification studies the design of a classifier robust to the manipulation of input by strategic individuals. However, the existing literature does not consider the effect of competition among individuals as induced by the…
In school choice, students make decisions based on their expectations of particular schools' suitability, and the decision to gather information about schools is influenced by the acceptance odds determined by the mechanism in place. We…
A growing number of authorities use mechanisms to allocate students to schools in a way that reflects student preferences and school priorities. However, most real-world mechanisms incentivize students to strategically misreport their…
Math placement is a crucial step between admission and full engagement with the university for students in STEM majors. Students' placement experiences influence not only their mathematical entry point on their degree pathway, but their…
Every year, over one million EU students choose a secondary school track based on teacher recommendations, yet little evidence shows this yields optimal assignments. Using Dutch data, we examine whether access to standardized test scores…
As machine learning algorithms increasingly influence critical decision making in different application areas, understanding human strategic behavior in response to these systems becomes vital. We explore individuals' choice between…
Evolutionary game dynamics in structured populations are strongly affected by updating rules. Previous studies usually focus on imitation-based rules, which rely on payoff information of social peers. Recent behavioral experiments suggest…
We conduct the first laboratory school choice experiment in which parents-the relevant decision makers in the field-are the experimental subjects. We compare Deferred Acceptance (DA) with two manipulable but potentially more efficient…
Segregation is widespread in all realms of human society. Several influential studies have argued that intolerance is not a prerequisite for a segregated society, and that segregation can arise even when people generally prefer diversity.…