Responsive affirmative action in school choice: A comparison study

Abstract

This note provides a comparison study on responsiveness of two extensively used mechanisms to affirmative action in school choice. For priority-based affirmative action, we show that, if a stronger priority-based affirmative action favors minority students by giving full priority to the minority, then such a policy makes each minority student weakly better off under the student-proposing deferred acceptance (henceforth, DA) mechanism. However, the top trading cycles (henceforth, TTC) mechanism does not satisfy this property. Under the DA mechanism, if the original problem gives full priority to the minority, then the assignment of minority students does not change when the problem moves to a higher level of affirmative action. On the contrary, this property does not hold under the TTC mechanism.