Middle School Admission in China–A Special Case of Boston Mechanism

Abstract

In this paper we study a widely-used mechanism in China to match finite number of primary school graduates to middle schools. The main question is what the equilibrium looks like when the number of schools are small. I solve the equilibrium by first eliminate weakly dominated strategies, then compute the incentive compatibility for each type of students. The equilibrium might or might not be unique, which depends on several variables such as the quota of each schools, the distribution of students’ preference and students’ valuation of each school available.