Paper #1280

Title:

Welfare of naive and sophisticated players in school choice

Authors:

Jose Apesteguia and Miguel A. Ballester

Date:

September 2011

Abstract:

Two main school choice mechanisms have attracted the attention in the literature: Boston and deferred acceptance (DA). The question arises on the ex-ante welfare implications when the game is played by participants that vary in terms of their strategic sophistication. Abdulkadiroglu, Che and Yasuda (2011) have shown that the chances of naive participants getting into a good school are higher under the Boston mechanism than under DA, and some naive participants are actually better off. In this note we show that these results can be extended to show that, under the veil of ignorance, i.e. students not yet knowing their utility values, all naive students may prefer to adopt the Boston mechanism.

Keywords:

School Choice; Naive Players; Welfare; Veil of Ignorance

JEL codes:

C7; D0; D6.

Area of Research:

Behavioral and Experimental Economics / Microeconomics

Published in:

Economics Letters, 115(2): 172-174, May 2012

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