This paper studies how welfare outcomes in centralized school choice depend on the assignment mechanism when participants are not fully informed. Using a survey of school choice participants in a strategic setting, we show that beliefs about admissions chances differ from rational expectations values and predict choice behavior. To quantify the welfare costs of belief errors, we estimate a model of school choice that incorporates subjective beliefs. We evaluate the equilibrium effects of switching to a strategy-proof deferred acceptance algorithm, and of improving households' belief accuracy. We find that a switch to truthful reporting in the DA mechanism offers welfare improvements over the baseline given the belief errors we observe in the data, but that an analyst who assumed families had accurate beliefs would have reached the opposite conclusion.

中文翻译：

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异构信念与择校机制

本文研究了在未充分了解参与者的情况下，集中式学校选择中的福利结果如何取决于分配机制。通过对处于战略背景下的学校选择参与者的调查，我们表明，关于入学机会的信念不同于理性的期望值，并预测选择行为。为了量化信念错误的福利成本，我们估计了一个包含主观信念的学校选择模型。我们评估了转换为策略验证的延迟接受算法以及提高家庭的置信度的均衡效应。我们发现，鉴于我们在数据中观察到的信念错误，DA机制中向真实报告的转换提供了比基线更高的福利，