Strategic Issues in College Admissions with Early Decision

In this paper, we consider college admissions with early decision using a many-to-one matching model with two periods. As in reality, each student commits to only one college in the early decision period and agrees to enroll if admitted. Under responsive and consistent preferences for both colleges and students, we show that there exists no stable matching system, consisting of early and regular decision matching rules, which is nonmanipulable via early decision quotas by colleges or early decision preferences by colleges or students.