Strategic Residential Location Choice: How Parents Game Priorities in School Matching

Most school choice matching mechanisms employed in theory and practice assume that schools rank students by characteristics that cannot be manipulated. However, parents may have incentives to misstate information used for determining school priorities, such as the proximity of the residential address to a school, particularly when such misrepresentations are difficult to detect or carry minimal penalties. If manipulation of school priorities occurs, the efficiency and fairness of the matching mechanism may be affected. Using official registration data on 330,000 children from the city of Vienna, I demonstrate that such strategic parental behavior occurs and establish lower bounds for its prevalence. Some parents register their child at a different residential address a few months before applying to a school and change the official residential address back to the original address after the child has been successfully enrolled. Migrants and families with lower education levels are less likely to game the system. A survey among 1,300 parents of first graders suggests that this negatively affects parents and children who are sincere. This paper was accepted by Yan Chen, behavioral economics and decision analysis. Funding: The parents survey was funded by the Institute for Markets and Strategy, Vienna University of Economics and Business. Supplemental Material: The online appendix and data files are available at https://doi.org/10.1287/mnsc.2021.03711 .