A Characterization of the Top Trading Cycles Mechanism for the School Choice Problem

Abstract This paper characterizes the top trading cycles mechanism for the school choice problem. Schools may have multiple available seats to be assigned to students. For each school a strict priority ordering of students is determined by the school district. Each student has strict preference over the schools. We first define weaker forms of fairness, consistency and resource monotonicity. We show that the top trading cycles mechanism is the unique Pareto efficient and strategy-proof mechanism that satisfies the weaker forms of fairness, consistency and resource monotonicity. To our knowledge this is the first axiomatic approach to the top trading cycles mechanism in the school choice problem where schools have a capacity greater than one.