School choice under complete information: An experimental study

DOI link to open access article: School choice under complete information: An experimental study

Yan Chen, Yingzhi Liang, Tayfun Sönmez

Journal of Mechanism and Institution Design
Volume 1, issue 1, pages 45-82 (December 2016)
doi: 10.22574/jmid.2016.12.002

Abstract:

We present an experimental study of three school choice mechanisms under complete information, using the designed environment in Chen & Sönmez (2006). We find that the top trading cycles (TTC) mechanism outperforms both the Gale-Shapley deferred acceptance (DA) and the Boston immediate acceptance (BOS) mechanism in terms of truth-telling and efficiency, whereas DA is more stable than either TTC or BOS. Compared to the incomplete information setting in Chen & Sönmez (2006), the performance of both TTC and BOS improves with more information, whereas that of DA does not.

Keywords: School choice, Experiment, Mechanism design.

JEL Classification Numbers: C78, C92, D82.