School choice : a discrete optimization approach

An equitable and flexible mechanism for assigning students to schools is a major concern for many school districts. The school a student attends dramatically impacts the quality of education, access to resources, family and neighborhood cohesion, and transportation costs. Facing this intricate optimization problem, school districts often utilize to stable-matching techniques which only produce stable matchings that do not incorporate these different objectives; this can be expensive and inequitable. We present a new optimization model for the Stable Matching (SM) school choice problem which relies on an algorithm we call Price-Costs-Flexibility-and- Fairness (PCF2). Our model leverages techniques to balance competing objectives using mixed-integer optimization methods. We explore the trade-offs between stability, costs, and preferences and show that, surprisingly, there are stable solutions that decrease transportation costs by 8-17% over the Gale-Shapley solution.

Name thesis:degree_name

Master

Department dc:contributor.department

Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Operations Research Center

Grantor dc:publisher

Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Year dc:date.issued

2020

Author dc:creator

• Graham, Justin W.

Advisor dc:contributor.advisor

• Dimitris Bertsimas.

• Operations Research Center.

Statement dc:rights

• MIT theses may be protected by copyright. Please reuse MIT thesis content according to the MIT Libraries Permissions Policy, which is available through the URL provided.

Licence dc:rights.uri

• http://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/7582

Language dc:language.iso

eng

Handle dc:identifier.uri

https://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/127294

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:dspace.mit.edu:1721.1/127294