Making School Choice Lotteries Transparent

Lotteries are commonly employed in school choice to fairly resolve priority ties; however, current practices leave students uninformed about their lottery outcomes when submitting preferences. This paper advocates for revealing lottery results prior to preference submission. When preference lists are constrained in length, revealing lotteries can reduce uncertainties and enable informed decision-making regarding the selection of schools to rank. Through three stylized models, we demonstrate the benefits of lottery revelation in resolving conflicting preferences, equalizing opportunities among students with varying outside options, and alleviating the neighborhood school bias. Our findings are further supported by a laboratory experiment.