Learning and adaptation in the social sciences: NAS Sackler conference, January 10-11

Ido Erev and I will be presenting a paper  on learning and choice behavior at one of the Sackler Colloquia run by the National Academy of Sciences:

In the Light of Evolution VIII: Darwinian Thinking in the Social Sciences

Organized by Brian Skyrms, John C. Avise and Francisco J. Ayala

January 10-11, 2014 at the Arnold and Mabel Beckman Center in Irvine, CA.

 Overview

Darwinian thinking is now having a major impact in social science, both in the consideration of the consequences of biological and cultural evolution on traditional questions, and in the use of quasi-Darwinian adaptive dynamics in evolutionary game theory. This Darwinian point of view is having a major impact on economics, political science, sociology, anthropology, and demography.

Agenda

I.  Evolution of Social Norms

Bargaining and Fairness, Kenneth Binmore, University College London
Cooperation, Natalia Komarova, University of California, Irvine
Friendship and Natural Selection, James H. Fowler, University of California, San Diego
Reputation and Punishment, Michihiro Kandori, University of Tokyo

II. Social Dynamics

The Replicator Equation and Other Game Dynamics, Ross Cressman, Wilfrid Laurier University
Payoff-Based Learning Dynamics, Alvin Roth, Harvard University
Strategic Learning Dynamics, David K. Levine, Washington University
Cultural Evolution, Marcus W. Feldman, Stanford University

Keynote Address:  Public Goods: Competition, Cooperation, and Spite, Simon A. Levin, Princeton University

III. Special Sciences

Evolutionary Demography, Kenneth W. Wachter, University of California, Berkeley
Folklore of the Elite and Biological Evolution, Barry O’Neill, University of California, Los Angeles
Economics, Ted Bergstrom, University of California, Santa Barbara
Psychology, Dale Purves, Duke-National University of Singapore Graduate Medical School

IV. Applications

Evolutionary Implementation in Mechanism Design, Éva Tardos, Cornell University
Some Dynamics of Signaling, Brian Skyrms, University of California, Irvine
The Rate of Innovation Diffusion in Social Networks, H. Peyton Young, Oxford University
Homophily, Culture, and Coordinating Behaviors, Matthew O. Jackson, Stanford University

Market design experiments today in Philadelphia

Jan 03, 2014 10:15 am, Philadelphia Marriott, Meeting Room 307 
Economic Science Association

Market Design Experiments (C9)

Presiding: JACOB GOEREE (University of Zurich)

From Boston to Chinese Parallel to Deferred Acceptance: Theory and Experiments on a Family of School Choice Mechanisms

YAN CHEN (University of Michigan)

ONUR KESTEN (Carnegie Mellon University)

[View Abstract]

Opt-In versus Mandated Choice for Deceased Organ Donation: An Experimental Study of Actual Organ Donation Decisions

ALVIN E. Roth (Stanford University)

JUDD KESSLER (University of Pennsylvania)

[View Abstract]

Ascending Prices and Package Bidding: Further Experimental Analysis

JOHN H. KAGEL (Ohio State University)

YUANCHUAN LIEN (Hong Kong University of Science & Technology)

PAUL MILGROM (Stanford University)

[View Abstract] [Download Preview]

Spectrum Auction Design: Simple Auctions for Complex Sales

MARTIN BICHLER (Technical University Munich)

JACOB K. GOEREE (University of Zurich)

STEFAN MAYER (Technical University Munich)

PASHA SHABALIN (Technical University Munich)

[View Abstract] [Download Preview]

Discussants:

SCOTT DUKE KOMINERS (University of Chicago)

ERIC GLEN WEYL (University of Chicago)

CARY DECK (University of Arkansas)

TOM WILKENING (University of Melbourne)

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Later in the day there will be another experimental session sponsored by the ESA, and another tomorrow...:

Jan 03, 2014 2:30 pm, Philadelphia Marriott, Meeting Room 307
Economic Science Association
Experiments in Economic Development
Presiding: PAULINE GROSJEAN (University of New South Wales)

Institutional Quality, Culture, and Norms of Cooperation: Evidence from a Behavioral Field Experiment
PAULINE GROSJEAN (University of New South Wales)
ALESSANDRA CASSAR (University of San Francisco)
GIOVANNA D'ADDA (University of Birmingham)

Trust and Social Collateral: Empirical Evidence
TANYA S. ROSENBLAT (Iowa State University)
DEAN KARLAN (Yale University)
MARKUS M. MOBIUS (Iowa State University, NBER and Microsoft Research)
ADAM SZEIDL (Central European University)

Health Providers and Patients in Kenya: An Evaluation of Motivations, Interactions and Reports on Sub-Par Behaviors
DANILA SERRA (Southern Methodist University)
ISAAC MBITI (Southern Methodist University)
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Jan 04, 2014 8:00 am, Philadelphia Marriott, Meeting Room 307
Economic Science Association
Identifying Time Preferences from Lab and Field Data
Presiding: CHARLES SPRENGER (Stanford University)

A Perspective on Measuring Discounting and Present Bias
JAMES ANDREONI (University of California-San Diego)

Recent Developments in the Measurement of Time Preferences
GLENN W. HARRISON (Georgia State University)

Identifying Self Control in Field Data
SENDHIL MULLANAITHAN (Harvard University)
SUPREET KAUR (Columbia University)
MICHAEL KREMER (Harvard University)

Joel Klein on school choice

Joel Klein, who was Chancellor of NYC schools when school choice was introduced in New York City high schools, writes in the Daily News: Harness the power of school choice: Competition works in education, too

Of course, details matter: see yesterday's post on an effort that didn't quite work out as planned, in San Francisco. Yesterday's post also has links to some school choice efforts that seem quite promising, however.

School choice in San Francisco, reports on first year

I've written before about school choice in San Francisco, and about how Muriel Niederle and Clayton Featherstone led the effort by a group of our colleagues to design a strategy-proof choice algorithm (explained here at a Board meeting in 2010), based on transfer cycles ("top trading cycles" to game theorists...). The school board adopted the plan, but then the staff of the school district decided to implement it themselves, without making the details public. Fast forward to 2012, when the first children have been assigned by the new plan.

Rachel Norton's blog has a post about it here: They're out! School Assignment Letter 2012, and an earlier one here, with a link to a March 5, 2012 SFUSD report on Student Assignment. As in the previous SFUSD reports, this does not describe the choice algorithm, it only describes the "tie breakers" that are used whenever the algorithm would otherwise try to assign more students to a school than it has room for.

This outraged Stan Goldberg (who reports about SF schools as "Senior Dad"), and he posted a video about the lack of transparency called Assignment System Fraud?

He must be an influential guy, because this prompted SFUSD to post some new information, including this "fact sheet" dated March 23, called How does the student assignment computer program work?  It still doesn't come close to explaining the actual algorithm they use, but it does include a diagram of "transfer cycles."

Which raises a question. If they in fact implemented the plan we proposed and the Board adopted, you would think they would want to make this clear. The benefits of a strategy-proof assignment procedure can only be realized if parents know that they can safely list their true preferences.

On the other hand, if the algorithm isn't correctly implemented, or if some other assignment algorithm is implemented (whether or not it includes some use of transfer cycles) then it would most likely not be strategy-proof, that is, it might not be safe for parents to reveal their true preferences, and it might be in the interest of some to "game the system" in some way. That might account for a desire to keep the algorithm secret. (So might a desire to avoid revealing any inadvertent mistakes in implementation...)

I should say that SFUSD's brief description of their algorithm doesn't look to me like it describes one that is strategy-proof...:(On the contrary, it looks like it might be patched together from something like Boston's old immediate acceptance algorithm followed by some trading...but then again, it isn't a complete enough description to make me confident that it is a description of whatever they are in fact doing...)

Anyway, one point of this post is to say that, unlike the case of the systems in New York and Boston and the work that IIPSC is doing around the country, my colleagues and I don't know what algorithm SFUSD is using, even though we know what we proposed and the Board adopted. So...this post is a bit like the ads that sometimes appeared in the financial sections of newspapers when I was young, which, following a divorce, would announce that Mr John Doe was henceforth no longer responsible for any debts incurred by the former Mrs John Doe...

What do policy makers want from a market design? And what would be the consequences of giving it to them? Clayton Featherstone on rank efficiency.

A surprising variety of allocation mechanisms, such as those used for school choice, ask participants to rank-order the alternatives; i.e. to indicate their first choice, second, third, and so forth. Not surprisingly, one thing that policy makers want to know about any proposed mechanism is how many people will receive their first choice, second, third, and so on.

Clayton Featherstone is a market designer who already has an unusual amount of experience in designing and implementing choice mechanisms. (If you recently got an assignment from Teach for America, or were assigned to a country for your global immersion requirement at HBS, you've benefited from his work.) His job market paper is an investigation of the properties of "rank efficient" mechanisms, which are designed to produce outcomes whose distribution of ranks can't be stochastically dominated:
Rank Efficiency: Investigating a Widespread Ordinal Welfare Criterion 

 Here's the Abstract: "Many institutions that allocate scarce goods based on rank-order preferences gauge the success of their assignments by looking at rank distributions, that is, at how many participants get their first choice, how many get their second choice, and so on. For example, San Francisco Unified School District, Teach for America, and Harvard Business School all evaluate assignments in this way. Preferences over rank distributions capture the practical (but non-Paretian) intuition that hurting one agent to help ten might be desirable. Motivated by this, call an assignment rank efficient if its rank distribution cannot feasibly be stochastically dominated. Rank efficient mechanisms are simple linear programs that can be solved either by a computer or through a sequential improvement process where at each step, the policy-maker executes a potentially non-Pareto-improving trade cycle. Both methods are used in the field. Preference data from Featherstone and Roth (2011)'s study of a strategy-proof match shows that if agents were to truthfully reveal their preferences, a rank efficient mechanism could significantly outperform alternatives like random serial dictatorship and the probabilistic serial mechanism. Rank efficiency also dovetails nicely with previous literature: it is a refinement of ordinal efficiency (and hence of ex post efficiency). Although rank efficiency is theoretically incompatible with strategy-proofness, rank efficient mechanisms can admit a truth-telling equilibrium in low information environments. Finally, a competitive equilibrium mechanism like that of Hylland and Zeckhauser (1979) generates a straightforward generalization of rank efficiency and sheds light on how rank efficiency interfaces with fairness considerations."

Clayton’s paper also solves an empirical puzzle about those matching mechanisms that we see “in the wild”. The theory literature has paid a good deal of attention to ordinally efficient mechanisms, as first described by Bogomolnaia and Moulin, who showed that ordinal efficiency can be obtained through a class of “simultaneous eating” mechanisms. But, despite the appeal of ordinal efficiency, no one has ever reported that such mechanisms have been observed in use. Clayton shows that a class of linear programming mechanisms  and an equivalent class of incremental improvement mechanisms that we do observe in practice produce rank efficient outcomes. So, he shows, there are ordinally efficient mechanisms in use; just not those that were previously known to produce ordinally efficient outcomes before he showed that they produced rank efficient outcomes and that rank efficiency implies ordinal efficiency.

Clayton is an unusually experienced market designer whose field experience motivates novel theoretical insights. He's also a talented experimenter who studies market design issues in the lab. He's a Stanford Ph.D. who is finishing up a two-year postdoc with me at Harvard. His other papers are on his Stanford job market page; you could hire him this year.

Further followup on school choice in San Francisco

My Thursday post, Followup on school choice in San Francisco, has generated some followup on its own, in the form of an audio interview yesterday of School Board member Rachel Norton by Stan Goldberg who follows the SF school system under the name Senior Dad.  He summarizes the interview as "Straight answers from Commissioner Norton “because people have a right to know”."

The issue is whether the algorithm adopted by the board last year was in fact implemented correctly by the district staff. It's an important question because the correctly implemented algorithm would be strategy proof, and if parents had confidence in this it would vastly simplify the school choice system from parents' point of view.

Here is my very incomplete and possibly imperfect transcript to give the flavor of the last 5 minutes of the interview (starting just after minute 39) in which Stan Goldberg (SG) raises this issue, and Rachel Norton (RN) replies. It's worth listening to.

SG “The school district was supposed to release the algorithm they were assigning students on, and so far they have not released that algorithm.”

RN “you’ve been reading Al Roth’s blog” ...“I’ve advocated for that, and will continue to advocate for that. I don’t think the staff right now wants to do that. [laughter] But short of 5 votes, 4 votes, they don’t have to.

…

SG ‘why should the public trust the school district?  “I’ve had the deputy Superintendent say ‘you guys shouldn’t trust us, we haven’t been reliable’. He said that; I believed him.”

RN “I don’t know what to tell you Sam, I think we should release the algorithm, and I’ve said that to staff, I’ve said that to the Superintendent”…short of 3 other board members joining with me and demanding that it be released the superintendent can do what he thinks is best,  unless he’s ordered by the board to do something else…”

SG “not releasing the algorithm makes everybody think something funny is going on…”

RN” well, not everyone…”

Followup on school choice in San Francisco

My previous post on how school choice is faring in San Francisco was called  School choice in San Francisco: a promise of transparency.  That promise still hasn't been fulfilled.

The idea was that, after the adoption by the school board of a New school choice system in San Francisco, SFUSD decided to implement the new, strategy-proof  "assignment with transfers" choice system itself (San Francisco school choice goes in-house).

School Board member Rachel Norton wrote in a November 9, 2010 blog post that
"Staff did pledge to make the documentation of the algorithm requirements and process flows public by February; I will continue to push to make the assignment algorithm itself open source."

While SFUSD has prepared a number of documents since then, none of them seem to contain a description of the SF school choice algorithm as actually implemented by the staff. All I can find are descriptions of the priorities used for tie-breaking if more children than can be accommodated by a school would otherwise have been assigned there, but no description of the process by which they would have been assigned before tie breaking has to be invoked.

The latest document of that sort, via Rachel Norton's June 1 blog post, is here: Board of Education Policy.
On page 7, under the heading "Method of Allocating Seats," the document states "The SFUSD will replace the diversity index lottery system with an assignment with transfers algorithm that uses school requests from families and the preferences outlined in this student assignment policy."
However the document doesn't describe the assignment with transfers algorithm at all, just the tie breaking priorities.

So...I'm still in the dark about whether SFUSD has actually implemented the choice system the Board adopted, and I bet SF parents and board members are too.
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Read more »

School districts face a multitude of problems

My colleagues and I mostly interact with municipal school districts regarding questions of school choice. But of course school boards and districts have to deal with a whole multitude of problems, some of which sometimes impact their school choice decisions (either directly, or just because some problems are even more pressing).

In NY, Class Sizes Grew in City Despite ’07 Deal to Cut Them.
And here's a story, that in discussing opposition to Mayor Bloomberg's newly nominated schools Chancellor, also provides a good summary of the size of the changes he and Chancellor Joel Klein tackled: Frustrations With Mayor Are Backdrop to Nominee Uproar
     "Mr. Klein took office soon after the State Legislature handed the mayor control of the school system — no one yet knew how it would play out, and few would have imagined the scope of the overhaul that the mayor has since engineered. Mr. Bloomberg had yet to dissolve the 32 school districts that were a bedrock of the system and that, while chronically corrupt in some places, were also a crucial lifeline for parents with questions and concerns.
     "Sure, people who follow such things knew that the Board of Education, once a hotbed of political squabbling, would be replaced by a panel whose majority would be appointed by the mayor. But no one foresaw that if the mayor’s appointees disagreed with his policies they would be fired, as two were on the eve of a controversial panel vote in 2004, rendering the panel toothless. Now that it is clear that mayoral control really means mayoral control, the question of who would execute the mayor’s wishes has taken on more importance. "

Boston also has serious budget problems, which directly affect school choice: School officials in Hub urge closings
"The scenarios following Superintendent Carol R. Johnson’s recommendations last month to close several schools represent the stark realities confronting the school system as it prepares for its fourth consecutive year of budget cutting. The district is projecting a $63 million shortfall for the school year beginning September 2011. Last night, officials said the 2012-13 school year could be even worse, with an anticipated $91 million shortfall...
"The 40-minute financial presentation last night did little to quell the protests from the schools recommended for closure: the East Zone Learning Center, Emerson Elementary, Clap Elementary, Social Justice Academy, and the Engineering School in Hyde Park....
"In January, the school district is expected to raise once again the divisive issue of changing the way the district assigns students to schools after a similar attempt failed two years ago amid public uproar. The effort is intended to reduce busing costs by shrinking the geographic regions from which families can choose schools. If the district comes up with a palatable plan, any savings are not expected to be realized for at least two years."

and
More schools targeted to close in Hub
"The School Committee is slated to vote Dec. 15 on Johnson’s proposal. The committee needs to act quickly because next month parents start submitting their choices of where they want to send their children to school next fall.
...
"But some of those buildings might not sit empty for long. In a separate announcement late yesterday afternoon, Johnson and Mayor Thomas M. Menino said some buildings may be leased to charter schools, which are planning an aggressive expansion in the city."

In San Francisco, there are problems on the school district staff: San Francisco School Administrators Schemed to Take Money, Documents Say
"A group of San Francisco Unified School District administrators, including an associate superintendent, engaged in a long-running scheme to funnel district money into their personal bank accounts via nonprofit community organizations, according to internal documents. "
In short, market design takes place, when it does, amidst a noisy, difficult background, particularly in tough financial times.

Strategy-proofness and strategy sets: residency fraud in school choice

When we speak of strategy-proofness in the context of school choice, we are most often speaking about whether it is safe for parents to reveal their true preferences when asked to submit a rank ordering of possible school assignments. Of course, parents have other private information as well, and they may have incentives to misprepresent that also.

I'm reminded of this by the fact that the San Francisco Unified School District has recently sent a letter to the address of record to each student regarding an Amnesty Period for Residency Fraud.
(It includes the line "This letter is directed to families that have committed residency fraud. Parents/Guardians who have never submitted false residency information to the District may disregard this letter.")

School choice in San Francisco: a promise of transparency

San Francisco school board member Rachel Norton blogs about the most recent school board meeting this week, concerning the new SF school choice algorithm, which they are now implementing in house (see this earlier post, and a followup interview).

The latest news sounds good regarding plans for transparency. Norton writes:

"Staff did pledge to make the documentation of the algorithm requirements and process flows public by February; I will continue to push to make the assignment algorithm itself open source."

Interview concerning San Francisco school choice

The San Francisco Briefing Room carries an audio interview by Stan Goldberg with Attila Abdulkadiroglu and me (about 30 minutes): Assignment System at Risk.
Here's his blurb: "With the deadline for submitting applications for school assignment in the San Francisco Unified School District rapidly approaching the school district has advised its independent advisors who were scheduled to program the assignment system for free that their services were not needed. Does this action imperil the implementation of the system on time? Has school district transparency moved back to the dark ages? Here’s the story from the design team’s perspective."


(Here are my previous posts on San Francisco school choice.)

San Francisco school choice goes in-house

Those of you who have been following school choice developments here know that, for the past year,  Atila Abdulkadiroglu, Clayton Featherstone, Muriel Niederle, Parag Pathak and I have been helping the San Francisco Unified School District design a new school choice system, which was adopted by the SF School Board last March.

The original plan was that we would continue to offer our services free of charge to implement the software, and then help monitor the effects of the new choice system.

Last week we heard from SFUSD staff that, because of concerns about sharing confidential data for monitoring the effects of the new system, they have decided to do further development in-house, and so will develop software to implement the new design on their own.

The SFUSD staff  have  been left with a sufficiently detailed description of the "assignment with transfers" design the Board  approved to move ahead with it if they wish. But it will take a good deal of care in implementing the new algorithm in software if its desirable properties--strategic simplicity and non wastefulness--are to be realized. (Both of these features were lacking in the old SFUSD assignment system, the one to be replaced.)

Below are links to some of the key developments before last week.

Here is a post with a link to the video of Muriel Niederle presenting the new design that the Board ultimately voted to adopt: SF School Board Meeting, Feb 17: new choice system.
And here is a link to the slides she presented, giving a description (with examples) of the new choice algorithm: Assignment in the SFUSD, and discussions of the features that make it strategically simple, non wasteful, and flexible.

In March 2010 the San Francisco Board of Education unanimously approved the new system. In their March 2010 press release (now here), the SFUSD reported (emphasis added):

"The choice algorithm was designed with the help of a volunteer team of market design experts who have previously been involved in designing choice algorithms for school choice in Boston and New York City. Volunteers from four prominent universities contributed to the effort, including Clayton Featherstone and Muriel Niederle of Stanford University, Atila Abdulkadiroglu of Duke University, Parag Pathak of MIT, and Alvin Roth of Harvard.
“We are pleased that the district has decided to adopt a choice architecture that makes it safe for parents to concentrate their effort on determining which schools they prefer, with confidence that they won’t hurt their chances by listing their preferences truthfully,” said Niederle and Featherstone, the Stanford research team."

A very simple description of the basic assignment with transfer algorithm is given on page 370 of this paper (where it is called "top trading cycles"). Much of the SFUSD school Board debate has focused on what priorities to implement. What is described on page 370 is a simple version of the underlying choice engine into which the priorities go (with a somewhat different description than in Muriel's slides). The priorities can depend on any characteristics of the students (e.g. previous schools, or siblings, or home zip code) or of the school (e.g. neighborhood or historical student composition). But to keep the process strategically simple--to make it safe for families to rank schools according to their true preferences--the priority of a student at a school cannot depend on how that student ranked that school. (If you happen to be the programmer asked to implement this, drop me a line if you run into trouble:)

Some related developments can be followed on the blog of SF Board of Education member Rachel Norton, including this September 15 post on delay in the implementation of the middle school assignment plan: Recap: Assignment committee recommends delay

General background on the theory and practice of designing school choice algorithms can be found here, and my earlier posts on San Francisco schools are here.

Update, 9/30/10: many comments followed the link to this post at The SF K Files
Update 10/2/10: Rachel Norton, the SF Board member/blogger gets emails asking if the new system will be strategy proof, and she says it will be: Reader mail: questions on student assignment

School choice in Darebin City, Victoria, Australia

It sounds like at least one school district in Australia has less bureaucracy than my colleagues and I have encountered in helping American cities reorganize their school assignment systems. Kwanghui Lim at CoRE Economics reports: Game Theory in Action: Sven Feldmann on Kindergarten Matching.

More on school choice here, and here. (And here is a video of Muriel Niederle presenting a new school choice algorithm to the San Francisco school board meeting that gave the go ahead for a redesign there.)

New school choice system in San Francisco

Board Approves New Student Assignment System for San Francisco Schools (now here)

Most of the last minute discussion was about what priorities different kinds of students will have at different kinds of schools. That is something that is likely to be adjusted from year to year. But the nice thing is that the underlying choice architecture will make it safe for parents to state their true preferences however the priorities are adjusted.

From the press release: "The choice algorithm was designed with the help of a volunteer team of market design experts who have previously been involved in designing choice algorithms for school choice in Boston and New York City. Volunteers from four prominent universities contributed to the effort, including Clayton Featherstone and Muriel Niederle of Stanford University, Atila Abdulkadiroglu of Duke University, Parag Pathak of MIT, and Alvin Roth of Harvard.
“We are pleased that the district has decided to adopt a choice architecture that makes it safe for parents to concentrate their effort on determining which schools they prefer, with confidence that they won’t hurt their chances by listing their preferences truthfully,” said Niederle and Featherstone, the Stanford research team."

Here are Rachel Norton's comments (she's a school board member with a blog), and here's the story from the SF Chronicle. Here are some of my recent posts on school choice; many of the recent ones tell the SF story as it unfolded.

Now, on to implementation.

Choosing schools (in NYC and SF)

I've written elswhere about the school choice process for public schools in San Francisco and for high schools in New York City. But, regardless of whether the process is a good one or not, the problem facing parents who have to decide how much they like each school can be a tough one, especially if there are a lot of schools.

Two articles help you feel the pain:

New Plan on School Selection, but Still Discontent discusses San Francisco, and
It’s a nightmare to apply for high schools in city discusses New York.

Some more background information here.

HT: Parag Pathak

SF School Board Meeting, Feb 17: new choice system

At the latest public meeting of the San Francisco Board of Education (last night, Wednesday, Feb. 17), the commissioners and the public were engaged in a detailed discussion of the algorithms and priorities being proposed for the new school choice system.

Muriel Niederle explains and answers questions about the new Assignment with Transfers school choice plans being proposed (with variations for elementary school, middle school, and high schools). She comes on just after minute 36 of this video of the 3 hour meeting, and her presentation, interspersed with questions and answers, continues for a little over an hour (to minute 1:39), although she's back answering questions at the end again. Also presenting the general plan and answering questions is Orla O'Keefe, the SFUSD official leading the effort to design the new school choice system.

There's something very encouraging about seeing the public policy discussion focusing on choice systems that are non-wasteful (Pareto efficient, for you economists), strategically simple for parents (so that truthful preference revelation is a dominant strategy), and flexible (so that the school board can tweak the system in years to come without harming the first two properties). The 'political' issues are the priorities that different children have at different schools.

Another attractive aspect of the proposal (discussed by Ms. O'Keefe following Muriel's presentation) is that data would be collected each year for continual monitoring of how the choice and assignment system is working.

The discussion touches on a number of interesting questions. (Even if the algorithm makes truthful preference revelation the best strategy, there are still issues of checking e.g. addresses in any system in which priorities at schools depend on home address...). But it looks like SF is well launched on adopting a sensible, workable, well thought out and flexible framework.

School choice in SF moves forward

Yesterday Muriel Niederle and Clayton Featherstone were among the presenters to the San Francisco Board of Education, speaking about possible designs for a new school choice system there. It seems that they are well on the way to a good outcome.

One of the Board members, Rachel Norton, has a blog on which she posted before and after accounts of the meeting:
Tonight’s student assignment meeting should be interesting!
Recap: Closing in on a student assignment policy

Here is a video of the whole meeting (but you can navigate a bit so you don't have to watch the full 3 hours: Muriel's testimony, from her slide presentation through answering of questions from the board is from 1:09 to 2:09 on the video).

For the technically inclined, papers about our prior work on school choice systems in NYC and Boston are here.

It has been mentioned in the SF discussions that our team of market designers has worked on a number of problems aside from school choice, so here are background links on some of them for SF readers who are interested:
National Resident Matching Program and related medical labor markets
Gastroenterologists, Orthopaedic surgeons
Kidney Exchange
AEA market for new economists

School choice in San Francisco, Chicago, and Cambridge MA

Changes in school assignment procedures are being discussed in San Francisco, Chicago, and even Cambridge, MA.

In San Francisco, the redesign is well under way, and the school board has a link to the redesign process: What Have We Done So Far.

An impresssive parent-organized blog outlines the San Francisco Student Assignment system, and the current process intended to reform it, initiated by the San Francisco Unified School District. One of the early posts assembles some of the relevant materials, including the SFUSD page about the Student Assignment Redesign (including some history and legal context), and the
SFUSD technical description of the current Student Assignment Process (which can now be found here).

Chicago has begun to rethink its school choice system; see New Proposed Admission Policy Information


In Cambridge, Parag Pathak proposed that a strategy-proof mechanism replace the old Boston-style mechanism (no longer used in Boston); see School Assigning Process Criticized--MIT professor presents a possible solution to the problem