Efficient Matching in the School Choice Problem
American Economic Review · 2022 · Volume 112 · Issue 6
Abstract
Stable matchings in school choice needn't be Pareto efficient and can leave thousands of students worse off than necessary. Call a matching μ priority-neutral if no matching can make any student whose priority is violated by μ better off without violating the priority of some student who is made worse off. Call a matching priority-efficient if it is priority-neutral and Pareto efficient. We show that there is a unique priority-efficient matching and that it dominates every priority-neutral matching and every stable matching. Moreover, truth-telling is a maxmin optimal strategy for every student in the mechanism that selects the priority-efficient matching.
Keywords
Bargaining Theory, Matching Theory, Analysis of Education, Education: Government Policy
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