We investigate the relative merits of the Boston and Serial Dictatorship mechanisms when the timing of students' preference submission over schools varies within the structure of the mechanism. Despite the well-documented disadvantages of the Boston mechanism (Abdulkadiroglu and Sonmez, 2003),...

In a college admission mechanism, students are often matched with colleges by using a noisy signal of their true abilities (e.g., their exam scores). The matching outcome thus may be imperfect in terms of ex-ante fairness, which suggests matching students with higher ability to better colleges....

We develop a method to measure the fairness of school matching mechanisms and apply it to the Boston mechanism used in the Chinese college admissions system. Fairness is measured by mismatch, or the gap between the actual and fair matching outcomes. An individual's mismatch is then related to...