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Game Theory in High School Admissions

 

http://news.mit.edu/2012/profile-pathak-0501

 

MIT professor, Parag Pathak has come up with a new way to apply game theory to the high school admissions process for students in New York and Boston. Professor Pathak’s work arose due to the ongoing issue students were facing in New York and Boston. These students were faced with the issue of how to strategically rank their school choices in a way that they could still keep their hopes of getting into a top one but also not overreaching too much that they get rejected from all their schools and therefore locked out of the system. Essentially, the issue was that students were not picking the correct dominant strategy, as discussed in lecture, when it came to the high school admissions process.

 

Professor Pathak saw this issue and posed a solution called the “deferred-acceptance algorithm”. This algorithm allows the schools to look at all the students that ranked them as their first pick and then either reject or accept them. After this process is done, the students are allowed to then alter their choices based on which schools wanted or did not want them. The entire idea of this algorithm is to get rid of the game theory that students are faced with when applying to high school.

 

I found this article very interesting because it is essentially about how the real life application of game theory actually helps to get rid of game theory in other areas. Like we learned in lecture, game theory is all about our behavior and the behavior of others. With the “deferred-acceptance algorithm”, it eliminates the unknown behavior of the “other”, therefore allowing us to make decisions without the fear of the unknown risk factor. My next interest in this algorithm is if it can be applied to college admission. I’m certain every college kid remembers the hours we spent with either a guidance counselor or parent making game theories by placing different schools into the “Reach, target, and safety” categories, and then after weighing all the risks, picking our top 20 schools to apply to on the common app. If they same theory could be applied to the college admissions process, it would allow for rising college students to apply to schools with a far more advanced game theory then the ones we use today.  

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