Kiel Working Papers, Kiel Institute for World Economics
No 1761:
Implementing quotas in university admissions: An experimental analysis
Sebastian Braun, Nadja Dwenger, Dorothea Kübler and Alexander Westkamp
Abstract: Quotas for special groups of students often apply in
school or university admission procedures. This paper studies the
performance of two mechanisms to implement such quotas in a lab experiment.
The first mechanism is a simplified version of the mechanism currently
employed by the German central clearinghouse for university admissions,
which first allocates seats in the quota for top-grade students before
allocating all other seats among remaining applicants. The second is a
modified version of the student-proposing deferred acceptance (SDA)
algorithm, which simultaneously allocates seats in all quotas. Our main
result is that the current procedure, designed to give top-grade students
an advantage, actually harms them, as students often fail to grasp the
strategic issues involved. The modified SDA algorithm significantly
improves the matching for top-grade students and could thus be a valuable
tool for redesigning university admissions in Germany
Keywords: College admissions, experiment, quotas, matching, Gale-Shapley mechanism, Boston mechanism; (follow links to similar papers)
JEL-Codes: C78,; C92,; D78,; I20; (follow links to similar papers)
46 pages, March 2012
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