Lotteries in Student Assignment: An Equivalence Result / Parag A. Pathak, Jay Sethuraman.

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Pathak, Parag A

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Material type: Text

TextSeries: Working Paper Series (National Bureau of Economic Research) ; no. w16140.Publication details: Cambridge, Mass. National Bureau of Economic Research 2010.Description: 1 online resource: illustrations (black and white)Subject(s):

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Abstract: This paper formally examines two competing methods of conducting a lottery in assigning students to schools, motivated by the design of the centralized high school student assignment system in New York City. The main result of the paper is that a single and multiple lottery mechanism are equivalent for the problem of allocating students to schools in which students have strict preferences and the schools are indifferent. In proving this result, a new approach is introduced, that simplifies and unifies all the known equivalence results in the house allocation literature. Along the way, two new mechanisms -- Partitioned Random Priority and Partitioned Random Endowment -- are introduced for the house allocation problem. These mechanisms generalize widely studied mechanisms for the house allocation problem and may be appropriate for the many-to-one setting such as the school choice problem.

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Item type	Home library	Collection	Call number	Status	Date due	Barcode	Item holds
Working Paper	Biblioteca Digital	Colección NBER	nber w16140 (Browse shelf(Opens below))	Not For Loan

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June 2010.

This paper formally examines two competing methods of conducting a lottery in assigning students to schools, motivated by the design of the centralized high school student assignment system in New York City. The main result of the paper is that a single and multiple lottery mechanism are equivalent for the problem of allocating students to schools in which students have strict preferences and the schools are indifferent. In proving this result, a new approach is introduced, that simplifies and unifies all the known equivalence results in the house allocation literature. Along the way, two new mechanisms -- Partitioned Random Priority and Partitioned Random Endowment -- are introduced for the house allocation problem. These mechanisms generalize widely studied mechanisms for the house allocation problem and may be appropriate for the many-to-one setting such as the school choice problem.