Weighted school choice problems and the weighted top trading cycles mechanism

There are a number of school choice problems in which students are heterogeneous according to the number of seats they occupy at the school they are assigned to. We propose a weighted school choice problem by assigning each student a so-called weight and formulate the weighted top trading cycles algorithm (WTTC) to find a matching. The WTTC is strategy-proof and results in a Pareto efficient matching. While the WTTC is a robust extension of the TTC when weights are introduced, it is no longer guaranteed that each student gets a seat at a school even if the overall capacity exceeds the sum of weights. Additionally, the WTTC introduces a trade-off between weights and priorities as a student with a higher weight has a disadvantage to be matched to a particular school compared to a student with the same schools’ priorities but a smaller weight. • We propose a weighted school choice problem. • The proposed mechanism WTTC is strategy-proof and results in a Pareto efficient matching. • The WTTC introduces a trade-off between weights and priorities.