Matching mechanisms are critical in determining the assignments of students to schools. We used agent-based modeling (ABM) to simulate the three mechanisms experienced in the fiercely competitive admission systems in China: serial dictatorship (SD), the Boston mechanism (BM), and the Chinese parallel mechanism (CP). We evaluated their multifaceted outcomes under different policy settings, school capacities, and behavioral assumptions. We have replicated their major characteristics found in the analytical models and showed that CP behaves as a hybrid of SD and BM. ABM allows us to distinguish their aggregate effects from distributional effects and their long-term level effects from short-term volatility effects. We found that this kind of “out-of-equilibrium’’ analysis, while mostly absent in the analytical equilibrium analysis, is crucial for practical policy analysis.
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Acknowledgments
The authors thank Troy Tassier for his valuable comments on the earlier version of the paper presented at the 41st Annual Conference of Eastern Economic Association held in New York during February 26 and March 1, 2015. The authors also thank the two anonymous referees for their painstaking review of the paper. The Ministry of Science and Technology Grant MOST 103-2410-H-004-009-MY3 is also gratefully acknowledged.
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Chen, SH., Wang, C.H. & Chen, W. Matching Impacts of School Admission Mechanisms: An Agent-Based Approach. Eastern Econ J 43, 217–241 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1057/s41302-016-0073-y
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/s41302-016-0073-y