在纽约市 Discovery 项目中发现机遇：高度竞争市场中的弱势学生
Discovering Opportunities in New York City's Discovery Program: Disadvantaged Students in Highly Competitive Markets
AI总结：
针对纽约市 DISC 政策造成弱势学生阻挡对及不当激励的问题，本文提出高度竞争市场条件，证明 JSA 机制优于 MR，并由 NYC DOE 十二年数据验证。
摘要：
Discovery 项目（DISC）是纽约市教育局（NYC DOE）用于增加低社会经济背景学生进入专门高中人数的一项政策。该政策在增加进入这些学校的弱势学生数量方面发挥了重要作用。然而，假设学生更关心自己被分配到的学校，而不是所占学额的类型（school-over-seat，即“学校优先于学位”假设），我们利用最近12个学年数据进行的实证分析表明，DISC 每年在弱势学生内部造成约950个组内阻挡对，每年影响约650名弱势学生。此外，我们发现该项目不尊重改进，因而在无意中产生了表现不佳的激励。这些实验结果得到了我们理论分析的证实。为缓解 DISC 引发的问题，我们考察了两种替代政策：少数族裔保留（MR）机制和联合学额分配（JSA）机制。作为主要理论贡献，我们提出市场的一个特征，称之为高度竞争性，并证明在该条件下，对所有弱势学生而言，JSA 都优于 MR。我们给出了高度竞争性得以验证的充分条件。NYC DOE 的数据满足高度竞争性条件；在该数据集上，我们的实证结果印证了理论预测，显示出 JSA 的优越性。鉴于 JSA 可通过对具有响应性偏好列表的经典延迟接受算法作简单修改来实施，我们认为，当“学校优先于学位”假设成立时，可以通过实施 JSA 机制更好地改革 Discovery 项目，尤其能为表现最好的弱势学生带来一致的激励。
英文摘要：
Discovery program (DISC) is a policy used by the New York City Department of Education (NYC DOE) to increase the number of admissions of students from low socio-economic background to specialized high schools. This policy has been instrumental in increasing the number of disadvantaged students attending these schools. However, assuming that students care more about the school they are assigned to rather than the type of seat they occupy (\emph{school-over-seat hypothesis}), our empirical analysis using data from 12 recent academic years shows that DISC creates about 950 in-group blocking pairs each year amongst disadvantaged students, impacting about 650 disadvantaged students every year. Moreover, we find that this program does not respect improvements, thus unintentionally creating an incentive to under-perform. These experimental results are confirmed by our theoretical analysis. In order to alleviate the concerns caused by DISC, we explore two alternative policies: the minority reserve (MR) and the joint-seat allocation (JSA) mechanisms. As our main theoretical contribution, we introduce a feature of markets, that we term high competitiveness, and we show that under this condition, JSA dominates MR for all disadvantaged students. We give sufficient conditions under which high competitiveness is verified. Data from NYC DOE satisfies the high competitiveness condition, and for this dataset our empirical results corroborate our theoretical predictions, showing the superiority of JSA. Given that JSA can be implemented by a simple modification of the classical deferred acceptance algorithm with responsive preference lists, we believe that, when the school-over-seat hypothesis holds, the discovery program can be changed for the better by implementing the JSA mechanism, leading in particular to aligned incentives for the top-performing disadvantaged students.
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