Reply to The downside of the DC school lottery

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]The system the OP is describing is (I think) pretty close to what DC used to do when each school ran its own lottery.  it was a mess.  The biggest issue from an economics point of view is that it led to a situation where there could have been a lot of mutually beneficial trades -- which means it was inefficient at allocating a scarce resource.  For example under the old system it was entirely possible for the following scenario to take place:

KidA gets into MV and has a bad waitlist number for IT, his parents prefer IT

KidB gets into IT and has a bad waitlist number for MV, his parents prefer MV

Under the new system, that won't happen because the parents will rank their choices and if KidA has a good number, he will rank IT first and get in there.  KidB would get into MV with a good number.  [/quote]

Ding ding ding ding! This is the correct answer. All the rest of you are wrong. OP, you’d need to argue against this suboptimal outcome. You can’t. You lose.

All the rest of you are also wrong.[/quote]

OP here.  You’re right.

If the algorithm uses more than one lottery number, this situation can occur.  This is a “non-stable assignment”.

Ok, makes sense. It’s still bad that kids get one lottery number for all schools per year.  Seems pretty sub-optimal.

It occurs to me that the algorithm is a deferred-assignment algorithm.  So I think the problem you’ve mentioned above can be resolved by an additional round  of swapping assignments to eliminate instability (of course, as in the current lottery system, this would all happen before any results are released.)  Swapping could also occur for waitlist rankings to ensure stability.  But that seems like a pretty complicated set of scenarios to try to ensure are non-game able.

Still, the one-number-per-year thing is a real bummer of the current system.[/quote]

OMG.  It is not the number of numbers that is causing some people to have a bad outcome!  There are not enough high-quality seats and that is the problem.  No lottery system is going to create more seats.  No matter how the lottery works, someone is going to have a bad outcome and feel that the system is a bummer.  Catch on already.[/quote]

Yes.  Before common lottery we applied for a zillion charters and were shut out of all of them.  In fact, people then were JUST as likely to not get a school they wanted as people now because its supply and demand.  No matter the system there aren't enough spots at schools people want.[/quote]

And, before the common lottery there was little visibility/process in how schools moved their waitlists. People who knew staff at the school could hop up the wait list because it wasn’t common/known across the system. [/quote]

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