A Survey to Assess the Scope of Preference Matching Deferred Acceptance Mechanism in India

The implementation of mechanism design in education markets in India and the scope of improvement are explored. The explored implementations are in three different types of markets: the first application is related to admission to the MBA programme at top-tier business schools, the second application is related to admission at the undergraduate level at the University of Delhi, while the last problem is related to admission to higher secondary level schools in the state of Bihar. All three problems are distinct in different aspects, such as the size of the market, the level of stakes in making a decision, the level of competition, etc. We compared the characteristics of the markets with the literature and observed that the Indian markets are suffering from issues of under-admissions, over-admissions, strategic behaviours in agents, congestion and lack of truthfulness. It is established that there is indeed a scope for the implementation of a fair matching mechanism based on deferred acceptance. The existing issues are identified, which lead to undesirable admission assignments, and a solution is discussed for the associated issues in each market.