Efficiency in a College Admission Experiment: A Preliminary Simulation with Cognitive Ability Scores

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This note presents two remarks about the specifications of the subject experiment designed and conducted by [4] regarding the problem of assigning students to schools as a large-scale data processing problem. We compared the efficiency of assignments under two mechanisms the Boston mechanism (Bos) and the deferred acceptance mechanism (DA). First, we first conducted a subject experiment in which subjects were categorized into two groups according to their scores of the Raven Advanced Progressive Matrices (APM) test, which measures cognitive ability. Subjects needed to compute their priority orders for schools from a queue of numbers. Next, we input the behavioral data observed in the early rounds of the subject experiment to the subjects’ submission of their preferences for schools and generated assignments under the Bos and the DA in order to create a virtual situation where subjects believed that the priority orders were actually unchanged, although those orders had been changed. Our main observations are as follows. (1) We should control the subjects’ cognitive ability scores and the mixtures of subjects with those scores in the experimental sessions in order to obtain the same result as the one observed by [4]. (2) Subjects might not compute the priority orders of students for schools exactly. Future research should further examine the conditions necessary to reproduce the experimental results of [4], based on the remarks clarified in this note,

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