Stanford GSB highlights Akbarpour and van Dijk on the virtues of strategy-proof school choice

Here's an article on the Stanford GSB website, describing a paper by Mohammad Akbarpour and Winnie van Dijk:

How School Choice Systems Create Unfair Advantages
Lotteries for public school admissions unintentionally favor students who have the option to attend private institutions, a new study shows.
June 26, 2020|by Maggie Overfelt

And here's the paper that the article highlights:
School Choice with Unequal Outside Options

By Mohammad Akbarpour, Winnie van Dijk

September 2018 Working Paper No. 3764

Economics

Students with identical valuations for public schools but unequal outside options have different opportunity costs of revealing their preferences. Consequently, manipulable mechanisms need not resolve conflicting preferences in a Pareto-improving manner. We show that when they do not, welfare improvements for students with outside options come at the expense of students without outside options. This result strengthens the argument that strategyproof mechanisms “level the playing field.” Our model predicts that students without outside options are more likely to strategize, consistent with recent findings in empirical studies of education markets.