Improving Transparency and Verifiability in School Admissions: Theory and Experiment

Students participating in centralized admissions procedures do not typically have access to the information used to determine their matched school, such as other students’ preferences or school priorities. This can lead to doubts about whether their matches were computed correctly (the “verifiability problem”) or, at a deeper level, whether the promised admissions procedure was even used (the “transparency problem”). In a model that spans many popular applications, we show how these problems can be addressed by providing appropriate feedback to students without disclosing sensitive information like other students’ preferences or school priorities. In particular, we show that the verifiability problem can be solved by (1) publicly communicating “cutoffs” (the minimum scores required to be eligible for each school) or (2) using “single-school” preference elicitation procedures that convey rich “experiential” information. In our main result, we show that the transparency problem can be solved by using cutoffs and single-school elicitation procedures together. We find strong support for these solutions in a laboratory experiment and show how they can be implemented for popular school admissions applications involving top trading cycles, and deferred and immediate acceptance.

This paper was accepted by Yan Chen, behavioral economics and decision analysis.

Funding: The authors acknowledge financial support from the Swiss National Science Foundation [Project 100018_207722]. Views expressed are personal and do not reflect the views of the organization.

Supplemental Material: The online appendix and data files are available at https://doi.org/10.1287/mnsc.2023.00105.