Seminar 218, Psychology and Economics: Alex Rees-Jones "Style over substance: The oversized role of presentation details in school-choice matching systems"
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Abstract: Since Abdulkadiroğlu and Sönmez (2003), economists have assessed school-choice systems nearly universally through the lens of mechanism design. In this paper, we experimentally assess this practice using the model completeness approach of Fudenberg, Kleinberg, Liang, and Mullainathan (2022). We present 10k experimental subjects with a simulation of a school choice decision, varying both the actual mechanism used and the manner in which the mechanism is communicated. Our presentations span a large number of potential versions of the most common lab-experimental paradigm as well as the presentations actually in use in US school districts. We find that respondents' propensity to either truthful or optimally report their preferences responds to the mechanism used and to the preference and priorities that are randomly assigned, as is predicted by any standard economic model. However, a significant portion of explainable variation remains unexplained by these factors, instead being
