BUSCADOR RECOLECTA

The theoretical literature on public school choice proposes centralized mechanisms that assign children to schools on the basis of parents’ preferences and the priorities children have for different schools. The related experimental literature analyzes in detail how various mechanisms fare in terms of welfare and stability of the resulting matchings, yet often provides only aggregate statistics of the individual behavior that leads to these outcomes (i.e., the degree to which subjects tell the truth in the induced simultaneous move game). In this paper, we show that the quantal response equilibrium (QRE) adequately describes individual behavior and the resulting matching in three constrained problems for which the immediate acceptance mechanism and the student-optimal stable mechanism coincide. Specifically, the comparative statics of the logit-QRE with risk-neutral and expected-payoff-maximizing agents capture the directional changes of subject behavior and the prevalence of the different stable matchings when cardinal payoffs (i.e., relative preference intensities) are modified in the experiment., Open Access funding provided thanks to the CRUE-CSIC agreement with Springer Nature. The authors gratefully acknowledge financial support from Fundación Ramón Areces. J. Alcalde-Unzu gratefully acknowledges financial support from Ministerio de Ciencia, Innovación y Universidades (PGC2018-093542-B-I00 and PID2021-127119NB-I00). F. Klijn gratefully acknowledges financial support from AGAUR–Generalitat de Catalunya (2017-SGR-1359 and 2021-SGR-00416) and the Spanish Agencia Estatal de Investigación (AEI) through grants ECO2017-88130-P and PID2020-114251GB-I00 and the Severo Ochoa Programme for Centres of Excellence in R&D (Barcelona School of Economics CEX2019-000915-S). M. Vorsatz gratefully acknowledges financial support from Ministerio de Ciencia, Innovación y Universidades (PGC2018-096977-B-I00 and PID2021-122919NB-I00).