Undergraduate Course Allocation through Competitive Markets

Abstract

Prevailing methods of course allocation at undergraduate institutions involve reserving seats to give priority to designated groups of students. We introduce a competitive equilibrium-based mechanism that assigns course seats using student preferences and course priorities. This mechanism satisfies approximate notions of stability, efficiency, envy-freeness, and strategy-proofness. We evaluate its performance relative to a mechanism widely used in practice using preferences estimated from university data. Our empirical findings demonstrate an improvement in student satisfaction and allocation fairness. The number of students who envy another student of weakly lower priority declines by 8 percent, or roughly 500 students.