Reply to The downside of the DC school lottery

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]The real problem is that the school lottery is a repeated game with highly correlated outcomes and it is being modelled as a single outcome.    As pointed out by a previous poster, it also exaggerates the idea of the ordering of choices being meaningful when there are really tiers of preference.  For example, if the preference between two choices is either zero or swamped by the noise of uncertainty, then this heavy emphasis on efficiency with respect to trading after assignment is silly. Ordinal ranking just isn't communicating all the information that parents have compiled.[/quote]

Hmm.  
Roth et al didn’t seem to write a lot about the DC lottery.  They describe the N.Y. lottery, but in that algorithm, schools rank as well as students (similar to the medical match that they developed earlier.)  So it’s hard to know for sure what the DC algorithm does. (If anyone has seen any description of the detailed algorithm of the DC lottery itself, please send.)

That said, the system seems to be a deferred-acceptance matching system that uses multiple rounds of matching before assigning all outcomes.  
It does model multiple possible outcomes via the multiple rounds of matching.

But as OP said, the current algorithm uses one lottery number for each child each year.

You raise another issue with the current lottery— that there’s no way for students to communicate ties in preference.  
In practice, I don’t think this influences the match much.  I don’t see a way to use tie information to improve the quality of the matching.   But you’re totally right that it gives parents a false sense of agency.  It would probably be better for parent psychology if there was a different way to indicate beyond mere ordinal ranking.[/quote]

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