Please use this identifier to cite or link to this item: https://hdl.handle.net/10419/141423 
Year of Publication: 
2016
Series/Report no.: 
WZB Discussion Paper No. SP II 2016-204
Publisher: 
Wissenschaftszentrum Berlin für Sozialforschung (WZB), Berlin
Abstract: 
We show that Ergin & Sönmez's (2006) results which show that for schools it is a dominant strategy to truthfully rank the students under the Boston mechanism, and that the Nash equilibrium outcomes in undominated strategies of the induced game are stable, rely crucially on two assumptions. First, (a) that schools need to be restricted to find all students acceptable, and (b) that students cannot observe the priorities set by the schools before submitting their preferences. We show that relaxing either assumption eliminates the strategy dominance, and that Nash equilibrium outcomes in undominated strategies for the simultaneous induced game in case (a) and subgame perfect Nash equilibria in case (b) may contain unstable matchings. We also show that when able to manipulate capacities, schools may only have an incentive to do so if students submit their preferences after observing the reported capacities.
Subjects: 
Mechanism Design
Two-Sided Matching
Boston Mechanism
School Choice
JEL: 
C78
D63
D78
D82
Document Type: 
Working Paper

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