> The system has been designed to not allow strategizing, as strategy often backfires on the student, as well as it's argued that students from lower class backgrounds make more strategic mistakes.
The flaw is even more fundamental than that. Even if everyone plays without strategic mistakes the results are still poor.
What the system is trying to do is assign students based on what school they want. So they want each student to give an ordered list of their true preferences and the lottery algorithm will do its best to hand them out.
Once you add trading to the system, the optimum strategy appears quite quickly: list the most desirable schools first. If you get lucky you'll have lots of in-game currency for the "trading phase" of the game.
If every student followed this strategy, you'd have lost all preference input to the system: every student would turn in a nearly-identical ranked list of schools by "trading value". Now the algorithm has no chance of working -- instead the system has devolved into a purely random lottery where lucky students will randomly be given more "points" (i.e. a desirable school worth trading for)
Outside of the pure game-theory issues with a trading scheme it also adds risk of other pressures being introduced. For example, suppose you're a parent and your boss suggests letting your child trade schools with their child... are you able to refuse?
The flaw is even more fundamental than that. Even if everyone plays without strategic mistakes the results are still poor.
What the system is trying to do is assign students based on what school they want. So they want each student to give an ordered list of their true preferences and the lottery algorithm will do its best to hand them out.
Once you add trading to the system, the optimum strategy appears quite quickly: list the most desirable schools first. If you get lucky you'll have lots of in-game currency for the "trading phase" of the game.
If every student followed this strategy, you'd have lost all preference input to the system: every student would turn in a nearly-identical ranked list of schools by "trading value". Now the algorithm has no chance of working -- instead the system has devolved into a purely random lottery where lucky students will randomly be given more "points" (i.e. a desirable school worth trading for)
Outside of the pure game-theory issues with a trading scheme it also adds risk of other pressures being introduced. For example, suppose you're a parent and your boss suggests letting your child trade schools with their child... are you able to refuse?