Games of school choice under the Boston mechanism

Many school districts in the U.S. use a student assignment mechanism that we refer to as the Boston mechanism. Under this mechanism, a student loses his priority at a school unless his parents rank it as their first choice. Therefore, parents are given incentives to rank high on their list the schools where the student has a good chance of getting in. We characterize the Nash equilibria of the induced preference revelation game. An important policy implication of our result is that a transition from the Boston mechanism to the student-optimal stable mechanism would lead to unambiguous efficiency gains.