“A New Perspective on Kesten's School Choice with Consent Idea”, with Qianfeng Tang, 2014,Journal of Economic Theory, 154 (2014), 543-561
We revisit the school choice problem with consent proposed by Kesten (2010), which seeks to improve the efficiency of the student-optimal deferred acceptance algorithm (DA) by obtaining students’ consent to give up their priorities. We observe that for students to consent, we should use their consent only when their assignments are Pareto unimprovable. Inspired by this perspective, we propose a new algorithm which iteratively reruns DA after removing students who have been matched with underdemanded schools, together with their assignments. While this algorithm is outcome equivalent to Kesten’s EADAM, it is more accessible to practitioners due to its computational simplicity and transparency on consenting incentives. We also adapt this algorithm for school choice problems with weak priorities to simplify the stable improvement cycles algorithm proposed by Erdil and Ergin (2008).
