Improving schools through school choice: An experimental study of deferred acceptance

In the context of school choice, we experimentally study the student-optimal stable mechanism where subjects take the role of students and schools are passive. Specifically, we study if a school can be better off when it unambiguously improves in the students’ true preferences and its (theoretic) student-optimal stable match remains the same or gets worse. Using first-order stochastic dominance to evaluate the schools’ distributions over their actual matches, we find that schools’ welfare almost always changes in the same direction as the change of the student-optimal stable matching, i.e., incentives to improve school quality are nearly idle.Financial support from AGAUR-Generalitat de Catalunya, Spain (2017-SGR-1359), Ministerio de Ciencia, Innovación y Universidades, Spain (ECO2017-88130-P), and the Severo Ochoa Programme for Centres of Excellence in R&D, Spain (SEV-2015-0563). Financial support from the Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia, Portugal under project reference no. PTDC/IIM-ECO/4546/2014. Financial support from Ministerio de Ciencia, Innovación y Universidades, Spain (PGC2018-096977-B-I00)