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

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Pathak, Parag A.

Contributor:

National Bureau of Economic Research.

Sethuraman, Jay.

Series:

Working Paper Series (National Bureau of Economic Research) no. w16140.

NBER working paper series no. w16140

Language:

English

Physical Description:

1 online resource: illustrations (black and white);

Other Title:

Lotteries in Student Assignment

Place of Publication:

Cambridge, Mass. National Bureau of Economic Research 2010.

Summary:

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.

Notes:

Print version record

June 2010.