Alvin E. Roth - School Choice Mechanism - Nobel Price in Economic Sciences- 2012

School choice mechanisms
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In May 2003 the Director of Strategic Planning at the New York City Dept. of Education contacted me for advice on designing a centralized high school admission process for the 90,000+ students who enter 9th grade in NYC each year. Parag Pathak and I undertook the task, and quickly started talking to Atila Abdulkadiroglu and Tayfun Sonmez, who had written a paper on school matching that appeared in the June 2003 AER. In September 2003 the Boston Globe carried a story on that paper, mentioning the resident matching program as a possible alternative design, that led to us all meeting with Boston Public Schools in October 2003 about redesigning the Boston school choice system. Neil Dorosin (who used to work at NYCDOE) founded the non-profit Institute for Innovation in Public School Choice (IIPSC) to promote modern school choice technology. IIPSC's projects include helping design and implement school choice systems in New Orleans, Denver and Washington DC.

New York City

Abdulkadiroglu, Atila , Parag A. Pathak, and Alvin E. Roth, "The New York City High School Match," American Economic Review, Papers and Proceedings, 95,2, May, 2005, 364-367.

Abdulkadiroglu, Atila , Parag A. Pathak, and Alvin E. Roth, "Strategy-proofness versus Efficiency in Matching with Indifferences: Redesigning the NYC High School Match,'' American Economic Review, 99, 5, Dec. 2009, pp1954-1978. And here are the AER links at which you can access the Appendix and Download the Data Software

Boston

Abdulkadiroglu, Atila, Parag A. Pathak, Alvin E. Roth, and Tayfun Sonmez, The Boston Public School Match," American Economic Review, Papers and Proceedings, 95,2, May, 2005, 368-371.

Abdulkadiroglu, Atila, Parag A. Pathak, Alvin E. Roth, and Tayfun Sonmez, "Changing the Boston School Choice Mechanism," January, 2006, this revision May 2006.

The new school choice mechanisms went into operation in New York City in 2003 (for students entering high school in 2004), and in Boston in 2006 (for 2007 entry into grades K, 6, and 9). In April, 2006 Harvard hosted a conference on Designing Choice, for schools officials and others interested in choice from around the country. Here are two articles written for a broad audience interested in education and mathematics, respectively. MATCHMAKING: ENABLING MANDATORY PUBLIC SCHOOL CHOICE IN NEW YORK AND BOSTON , By Thomas Toch and Chad Aldeman, and School Choice by Joseph Malkevitch. Here's an August 2010 article about me in Forbes that focuses on school choice in NYC. Here's a May 2012 article about Parag Pathak that focuses on his work on schools and school choice: Game theory in the real world. Here is a self-updating link to my blog posts on school choice.