Abstract Many countries use a centralized admission system for admitting students to universities. Typically, each student reports a ranking of his preferred colleges to a planner, and the planner allocates students to colleges according to the rules of a predefined mechanism. A recurrent feature in these admission systems is that students are constrained in the number of colleges that they can rank. In addition, students normally have private preferences over colleges and are risk-averse. Hence, they face a strategic decision under uncertainty to determine their optimal reports to the planner. We characterize students’ equilibrium behavior when the planner uses a Serial Dictatorship (SD) mechanism by solving an endogenous decision problem. We show that if students are sufficiently risk-averse, their optimal strategy is to truthfully report the “portfolio of colleges” with the highest probabilities of being available. We then analyze the welfare implications of constraining student choice by stressing the differences between the so-called consideration and conditional-allocation effects.

中文翻译：

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选择受限，个人偏好和风险规避下的大学分配问题

摘要许多国家使用集中式录取系统来录取学生进入大学。通常，每个学生都会向计划者报告其首选大学的排名，然后计划者会根据预定义机制的规则将学生分配给大学。这些录取系统的一个经常出现的特征是，学生受到他们可以排名的大学数量的限制。此外，学生通常对大学有私人偏好，并且规避风险。因此，他们面临不确定性下的战略决策，以确定向计划者的最佳报告。当计划者通过解决内生性决策问题使用串行专政（SD）机制时，我们将表征学生的均衡行为。我们表明，如果学生足够规避风险，他们的最佳策略是如实报告具有最高可用机率的“大学档案”。然后，我们通过强调所谓的考虑和条件分配效应之间的差异，来分析限制学生选择的福利含义。