Rationalizing mistakes in school choice mechanisms

Transactions take place everywhere, at every moment. When we think about transactions, we imagine the typical situation of commodity markets, where someone wants to obtain something from another person, and, in order to do so, a counterpart is given (money usually). However, transactions take place in a variety of situations where money cannot be used as the tool to match supply and demand, such as when assigning hospital beds to patients, doctors to hospitals or students to school/college places. In these situations, money is not used (actually, we would feel quite horrified if there were a situation where hospital beds were assigned to those who bet higher), so different mechanisms must be devised (different from the commodity markets and different from every one of them), so that the most efficient allocation of these very scarce resources could be made. That is the objective that market design theory would like to achieve. This paper focuses on school choice mechanisms, and carries out an econometric study about the specific mechanism used in Sabadell. Furthermore, it tries to explain the reasons that cause people to make mistakes when submitting their list of school preferences for their three-year-old children