Reserve Design: Unintended Consequences and the Demise of Boston’s Walk Zones

By Umut Mert Dur, Scott Duke Kominers, Parag A. Pathak, Tayfun Sönmez. Journal of Political Economy, 2018

122 citations recorded by the source corpus.

We show that in the presence of admissions reserves, the effect of the precedence order (i.e., the order in which different types of seats are filled) is comparable to the effect of adjusting reserve sizes. Either lowering the precedence of reserve seats at a school or increasing the school’s reserve size weakly increases reserve-group assignment at that school. Using data from Boston Public Schools, we show that reserve and precedence adjustments have similar quantitative effects. Transparency about these issues—in particular, how precedence unintentionally undermined intended policy—led to the elimination of walk zone reserves in Boston’s public school match.

Subfields: Economics and Econometrics, Education, Sociology and Political Science

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/c96793151a8b388150c888f3806ba5de2f02a698

Citations in the corpus

• Centralized Admissions for Engineering Colleges in India (2019, unknown): “Thus, the choice of precedence order affects not only the number of reserved category candidates admitted as noted by Dur et al. (2017), but crucially also the unpredictability/variability in the number of reserved category admits.”
• (Il)legal Assignments in School Choice (2017, unknown): “3For examples, see Abdulkadiroğlu and Sönmez (2003), Abdulkadiroğlu et al. (2005), Kominers and Sönmez (2016), and Dur et al. (2017). list of students.”