Constrained School Choice with Unequal Outside Options: Does Integration Matter?
Description
These data are for the paper titled "Constrained School Choice with Unequal Outside Options: Does Integration Matter?" Abstract: This paper studies how unequal access to attractive outside options affects decisions and outcomes in deferred-acceptance admissions under rank-order-list constraints, and whether integrating those options into the centralized mechanism changes those outcomes. It combines motivating evidence from Russian university admissions with a laboratory experiment in which only a subset of participants has access to an attractive option ranked just below the top in-system assignment. Participants with access behave more ambitiously, ranking the top in-system assignment first more often than otherwise identical participants without access. This generates unequal outcomes: participants without the outside option are more likely to experience priority violations and less likely to receive the top in-system assignment. When the option is integrated into the mechanism, participants without access behave similarly, but many participants with access misorder their top two options and rank the safer integrated option first, despite this being suboptimal. These behavioral mistakes attenuate the advantage created by unequal outside options and thereby yield more equal outcomes between participants with and without access, albeit at some cost in allocative efficiency. The results suggest that, under constrained rank-order lists, the effects of integrating previously off-system opportunities depend on actual applicant behavior and may differ from the predictions of frictionless rational models.
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Contained in the paper. The variable names are self explanatory.