'Equal Opportunity in School Choice Lotteries', a seminar by Dr Yuki Tamura (Ecole Polytechnique)

Equal Opportunity in School Choice Lotteries

by Dr Yuki Tamura

Abstract 

In Berlin and North Carolina’s Wake County school districts, all applying students are guaranteed a minimum chance of admission. This directly conflicts with the central property of respect for priorities in school choice. Our contribution is to formalize equal opportunity as a design property and study its implications. We relax other important properties to ensure compatibility, and show that existing mechanisms typically fail them. We propose probabilistic generalizations of three key mechanisms in the literature and evaluate their properties. Our generalization of Kesten (2010)’s mechanism performs best, lying on the efficient frontier given equal opportunity and priority constraints.

About the speaker

Dr Yuki Tamura is an Assistant Professor at the Department of Economics of  Ecole Polytechnique, CREST,  Institut Polytechnique de Paris.