Prof. Rustam Hakimov - HEC Lausanne
We address the growing perception that school and college admissions mechanisms lack transparency. We formalize two levels of transparency for centralized admissions. The first level—"verifiability''—provides each student with enough feedback so they can establish that their matched school is correct. We show how verifiability can be achieved via (1) the public communication of cutoffs, and (2) the private experience of participating in "predictable" multi-stage mechanisms. The second level —"transparency"—additionally rules out the possibility of a corrupt designer deviating by switching the mechanism or communicating false information without students' detection. We show that no such deviation is possible when cutoffs and predictable mechanisms are used together, providing a simple basis for achieving transparency in practice. We also provide an empirical measure of verifiability, which relies on students' ability to use feedback to verify their matches. To test this ability, we run a laboratory experiment based on the widely used student-proposing deferred-acceptance rule in school admissions and compare different mechanisms implementing this rule from the perspective of the empirical measure of verifiability. The results from the lab strongly support the proposed solutions.