Pareto Dominance of Deferred Acceptance through Early Decision

Abstract

An early decision market is governed by rules that allow each student to apply to (at most) one college and require the student to attend this college if admitted. This market is ubiquitous in college admissions in the United States. We model this market as an extensive-form game of perfect information and study a refinement of subgame perfect equilibrium (SPE) that induces undominated Nash equilibria in every subgame (SPUE). Our main result shows that this game can be used to define a decentralized matching mechanism that weakly Pareto dominates student-proposing deferred acceptance.