Credibility in school choice

Abstract

In centralized school choice, a designer who announces a mechanism may deviate from it to favor some students without being detected. A mechanism is credible if it admits no such deviation. We study this credibility problem when students do not know others' reports and may observe only part of the assignment. Credibility is demanding: among common school choice mechanisms, only deferred acceptance is credible, and only when students observe enough of the assignment. We therefore rank mechanisms by their credibility. Deferred acceptance is more credible than any other stable mechanism and strictly more credible than the Boston mechanism, regardless of how much of the assignment students observe. Its ranking relative to top trading cycles and efficiency-adjusted deferred acceptance depends on disclosure: deferred acceptance is strictly more credible when students observe the entire assignment, whereas the ranking reverses when students observe only their own assignment.