Iowa State University celebrates Bertan Turhan

 The Iowa State University News Service has an article about the market design work of Bertan Turhan.

New model could improve matches between students and schools

"For the majority of students in the U.S., residential addresses determine which public elementary, middle, or high school they attend. But with an influx of charter schools and state-funded voucher programs for private schools, as well as a growing number of cities that let students apply to public schools across the district (regardless of zip code), the admissions process can turn into a messy game of matchmaking.

"Simultaneous applications for competitive spots and a lack of coordination among school authorities often result in some students being matched with multiple schools while others are unassigned. It can lead to unfilled seats at the start of the semester and extra stress for students and parents, as well as teachers and administrators.

"Assistant Professor of Economics Bertan Turhan at Iowa State University and his co-authors outline a way to make better, more efficient matches between students and schools in their new study published in Games and Economic Behavior. Turhan says their goal was to create a fairer process that works within realistic parameters.

“There are a lot of success stories in major U.S. cities where economists and policymakers worked together to improve school choice,” said Turhan. “The algorithm we introduced builds on that and could give school groups some degree of coordination and significantly increase overall student welfare in situations where there’s a lot of competition to get into certain schools.” 

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"Over the next year, Turhan and his team will be studying the implementation of their model in India where two types of colleges have revamped their admissions process."

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Here's the paper that was the occasion of the story:

Parallel markets in school choice by Mustafa Oğuz Afacan, Piotr Evdokimov, Rustamdjan Hakimov, and Bertan Turhan

Games and Economic Behavior, Volume 133, May 2022, Pages 181-201, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.geb.2022.03.003Get rights and content

Abstract: When applying to schools, students often submit applications to distinct school systems that operate independently, which leads to waste and distortions of stability due to miscoordination. To alleviate this issue, Manjunath and Turhan (2016) introduce the Iterative Deferred Acceptance mechanism (IDA). We design an experiment to compare the performance of this mechanism under parallel markets (DecDA2) to the classic Deferred Acceptance mechanism with both divided (DecDA) and unified markets (DA). Consistent with the theory, we find that both stability and efficiency are highest under DA, intermediate under DecDA2, and lowest under DecDA. While IDA is not strategy-proof, we show theoretically that strategic reporting can only lead to improved efficiency for all market participants. The experimental results are consistent with this prediction. Our findings cast doubt on whether strategy-proofness should be perceived as a universal constraint to market mechanisms.