Honors Theses
Date of Award
2017
Document Type
Undergraduate Thesis
Department
Economics
First Advisor
Mark Van Boening
Relational Format
Dissertation/Thesis
Abstract
The past few decades have seen an increase in the debate and discussion of school choice, and recent literature has focused on mechanism design approaches to satisfy that choice. The literature includes experimental studies of these mechanisms. I conduct an experiment that examines the Gale-Shapley mechanism. This mechanism considers the rankings by parents and students of their preferred schools as well as the schools' priorities for students (based primarily on district or walk-zones) and uses a unique algorithm to produce student-school matchings. My experimental design is based primarily on that of Chinese College Admissions and School Choice Reforms: An Experimental Study (Chen and Kesten, 2016). I specifically attempt to answer a question raised in their findings about tacit coordination between participants to reach an unstable Pareto-efficient equilibrium. I allow experienced subjects to communicate during the experiment via electronic chat. I am interested in seeing if this communication can facilitate explicit coordination and consistently achieve this Pareto-efficient outcome. I find that experience combined with the chat feature do not seem to significantly affect participants' ability to coordinate towards the Pareto-efficient outcome, and consistently reaching this outcome is difficult to facilitate.
Recommended Citation
Hall, Amy, "An Experiment on Pareto-Efficiency and Communication in the Gale-Shapley School Choice Mechanism" (2017). Honors Theses. 60.
https://egrove.olemiss.edu/hon_thesis/60
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