Discovery program (DISC) is a policy used by the New York City Department of Education (NYC DOE) to increase the number of admissions of students from low socio-economic background to specialized high schools. This policy has been instrumental in increasing the number of disadvantaged students attending these schools. However, assuming that students care more about the school they are assigned to rather than the type of seat they occupy (\emph{school-over-seat hypothesis}), our empirical analysis using data from 12 recent academic years shows that DISC creates about 950 in-group blocking pairs each year amongst disadvantaged students, impacting about 650 disadvantaged students every year. Moreover, we find that this program does not respect improvements, thus unintentionally creating an incentive to under-perform. These experimental results are confirmed by our theoretical analysis. In order to alleviate the concerns caused by DISC, we explore two alternative policies: the minority reserve (MR) and the joint-seat allocation (JSA) mechanisms. As our main theoretical contribution, we introduce a feature of markets, that we term high competitiveness, and we show that under this condition, JSA dominates MR for all disadvantaged students. We give sufficient conditions under which high competitiveness is verified. Data from NYC DOE satisfies the high competitiveness condition, and for this dataset our empirical results corroborate our theoretical predictions, showing the superiority of JSA. Given that JSA can be implemented by a simple modification of the classical deferred acceptance algorithm with responsive preference lists, we believe that, when the school-over-seat hypothesis holds, the discovery program can be changed for the better by implementing the JSA mechanism, leading in particular to aligned incentives for the top-performing disadvantaged students.

翻译：发现计划（DISC）是纽约市教育局（NYC DOE）为增加弱势社会经济背景学生进入特殊高中录取人数而实施的一项政策。该政策在提高这些学校中弱势学生入学比例方面发挥了重要作用。然而，基于学生更在意被分配到哪所学校而非所获座位类型的假设（"学校重于座位假说"），我们利用近12个学年的数据进行的实证分析表明：DISC每年在弱势学生群体中产生约950个组内阻塞配对，影响约650名弱势学生。此外，我们发现该政策不满足"改善尊重"性质，从而意外地制造了成绩下滑的激励。这些实验结论得到了理论分析的印证。为缓解DISC引发的顾虑，我们探索了两种替代政策：少数族裔预留（MR）与联合席位分配（JSA）机制。作为主要理论贡献，我们引入了市场特征——"高度竞争性"，并证明在此条件下，JSA对所有弱势学生均占优于MR。我们给出了验证高度竞争性的充分条件。NYC DOE数据满足高度竞争性条件，针对该数据集的实证结果佐证了理论预测，显示JSA的优越性。鉴于JSA可通过简单修改具有响应偏好列表的经典延迟接受算法实现，我们认为在学校重于座位假说成立时，通过实施JSA机制可改进发现计划，特别是能为顶尖弱势学生群体创造激励相容条件。