Students Unknowingly Use Game Theory When Applying to High School
Students entering high school in Boston and New York City have a plethora of options, but no guaranteed acceptances. Schools are abundant in both these cities, though some more popular than most, and all receiving plenty of hopeful applicants to fill an incoming class. Students in Boston and New York are not limited to the schools in their area, so one would think that incoming freshmen would aim for schools that are the most popular with the best academic reputation.
However, ten years ago, students did not do that. Surprisingly it was more popular for students to apply to schools that were not as reputable academically, but where they had a higher chance of being accepted. Essentially, each perspective student was exercising game theory when choosing what schools to apply to. In Boston, perspective students were asked to choose their top three schools without an acceptance guarantee from any of them. Students would then strategize, analyzing the payoffs of what would happen if they chose three top schools, two top schools and a middle-tier school, one top school and two middle tier schools, all middle tier schools, and other combinations.
Though this game theory exercise would help the students get accepted, it did not benefit the students or schools. The students were often selling themselves short academically. Schools felt as though students were not applying because their academic institution was truly interesting, rather because it was easier to get into. In addition, this exercise, while common, involved many skewed personal opinions and predictions, thus causing about 20% of Boston high school applicants to experienced a strategic error when deciding where to apply (Dizikes).
This way of thinking became such a wide-spread issue in New York and Boston that New York City schools chancellor Joel Klein went to Harvard professor Alvin Roth in search of help. Roth obliged, and, with first year PhD student Parag Pathak, set forth to create a school selection system that eliminated strategy and game theory completely. Ultimately, they were successful, creating a system called the “deferred-acceptance algorithm” that pleased both the chancellor and the schools. For Boston schools, Roth and Pathak came up with a method that essentially let students continually pick schools until they were accepted into one.
“’Our whole agenda is to try to make these systems strategy-proof,’” (Dizikes) said Pathak, who was recently given tenure at MIT mostly because of his work in this field. His main goal was to make the system simpler for students, who are now able to choose schools they actually have an interest in rather than what they would expect to get into.
source: http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2012/profile-pathak-0501.html
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