Promoting Diversity of Talents: A Market Design Approach

I model a centralized matching problem between students and schools where students' priorities in schools are endogenous in terms of their efforts. I show that the consideration of endogenous aspects of students' priorities opens a new dimension of evaluating a matching system. An ill designed system could discourage students from pursuing the knowledge/skill in the skill categories that they are talented at. I propose four criteria of promoting diversity of talents: respecting versatility of talents, respecting versatility of talents with minimum efforts, respecting unique talents, and respecting unique talents with minimum efforts. These criteria are used to evaluate whether a matching system encourages students to pursue the knowledge/skill in the skill categories that they are talented at. Then, I propose four matching systems that accomplish these four criteria, respectively. The model in this paper could be applied to Taiwanese High School Match, Specialized High School matching program in New York City, Selective Enrollment High Schools matching program in Chicago, and Exam Schools matching program in Boston.

In 2014, the Taiwanese High School Match uses a new centralized matching program to allocate students to schools. I show that the unique features in this program either makes a matching system lose some desirable properties or fails the criteria of promoting diversity of talents defined in this paper.