School choice: Nash implementation of stable matchings through rank-priority mechanisms

Abstract

We consider school choice problems (Abdulkadiroğlu and Sönmez, 2003) where students are assigned to public schools through a centralized assignment mechanism. We study the family of so-called rank-priority mechanisms, each of which is induced by an order of rank-priority pairs. Following the corresponding order of pairs, at each step a rank-priority mechanism considers a rank-priority pair and matches an available student to an unfilled school if the student and the school rank and prioritize each other in accordance with the rank-priority pair. The Boston or immediate acceptance mechanism is a particular rank-priority mechanism. Our first main result is a characterization of the subfamily of rank-priority mechanisms that Nash implement the set of stable matchings (Theorem 1). Our second main result is a strong impossibility result: under incomplete information, no rank-priority mechanism implements the set of stable matchings (Theorem 2).