School Choice with Asymmetric Information: Priority Design and the Curse of Acceptance

An implicit assumption in most of the matching literature is that all participants know their preferences. If there is variance in the effort agents spend researching options, some may know more about their preferences, while others may know less. When this is true, strategizing is complex, (ex-post) stable outcomes need not exist, and informed agents gain at the expense of less informed agents, outcomes we attribute to a curse of acceptance. However, we also show that if priorities are designed appropriately, positive results are recovered: equilibrium strategies are simple, the outcome is ex-post stable, and less informed students are protected from the curse of acceptance. Our results have implications for the current debate over priority design in school choice.