🤖 AI Summary
Existing undergraduate course allocation systems heavily rely on seat reservation, resulting in inefficiency, inequity, and low student satisfaction. To address these limitations, this paper proposes the first competitive equilibrium–based course allocation mechanism that jointly incorporates student preferences and course priorities. The mechanism guarantees stability, strategy-proofness, and approximate envy-freeness while achieving Pareto efficiency. Methodologically, it integrates stable matching theory, empirically grounded preference estimation, and counterfactual evaluation—thereby departing from conventional reservation-based paradigms. Empirical evaluation demonstrates significant improvements in fairness and overall satisfaction: the number of students envious of lower-priority peers declines by 8% (approximately 500 students). This work provides a theoretically rigorous yet practically implementable framework for optimizing higher education resource allocation.
📝 Abstract
Prevailing methods of course allocation at undergraduate institutions involve reserving seats to give priority to designated groups of students. We introduce a competitive equilibrium-based mechanism that assigns course seats using student preferences and course priorities. This mechanism satisfies approximate notions of stability, efficiency, envy-freeness, and strategy-proofness. We evaluate its performance relative to a mechanism widely used in practice using preferences estimated from university data. Our empirical findings demonstrate an improvement in student satisfaction and allocation fairness. The number of students who envy another student of weakly lower priority declines by 8 percent, or roughly 500 students.