Reserve Design: Unintended Consequences and the Demise of Boston’s Walk Zones

Abstract

© 2018 by The University of Chicago. All rights reserved. We thank Kamal Chavda, Carol Johnson, Carleton Jones, Tim Nicollette, and Jack Yessayan for their expertise and for granting permission to undertake this study. Edward L. Glaeser, Arda Gitmez, Fuhito Kojima, Yusuke Narita, Peng Shi, and several seminar audiences provided helpful comments. Kominers is grateful for the support of National Science Foundation grants CCF-1216095 and SES-1459912, the Harvard Milton Fund, an American Mathematical Society–Simons Foundation Travel Grant, the Ng Fund and the Mathematics in Economics Research Fund of the Harvard Center of Mathematical Sciences and Applications, and the Human Capital and Economic Opportunity Working Group sponsored by the Institute for New Economic Thinking. Much of this work was conducted while Kominers was a research scholar at the Becker Friedman Institute at the University of Chicago. Pathak and Sönmez’s work was supported by NSF grant SES-1426566. Sönmez also acknowledges the research support of Goldman Sachs Gives via Dalinc Ariburnu—Goldman Sachs Faculty Research Fund. ering the precedence of reserve seats at a school or increasing the school’s reserve size weakly increases reserve-group assignment at that school. Using data from Boston Public Schools, we show that reserve and precedence adjustments have similar quantitative effects. Transparency about these issues—in particular, how precedence unintentionally undermined intended policy—led to the elimination of walk zone reserves in Boston’s public school match.