Expanding “Choice ” in School Choice

Abstract: Truthful revelation of preferences has emerged as a desideratum in the design of student assignment mechanisms in school choice programs. Gale-Shapley’s deferred acceptance mechanism is strategy-proof for students but limits their ability to communicate their preference intensities. This results in ex-ante inefficiency when ties at school preferences are broken randomly. We propose a practical deferred acceptance mechanism which allows students, via signaling their preference intensities, to influence how they are treated in ties. It maintains truthful revelation of ordinal preferences and supports a greater scope of efficiency, a new notion that helps us to compare mechanisms on the efficiency ground