Capacity Planning in Stable Matching

Optimizing School Seat Allocation to Improve Access and Fairness A growing shortage of public school seats in Chile has left thousands of students unassigned each year. In their forthcoming Operations Research paper, “Capacity Planning in Stable Matching,” Bobbio et al. (2025) develop a novel framework that jointly determines where to expand school capacities and computes a student-optimal stable assignment in the enlarged market. The study develops exact and heuristic methods that make this theoretically complex problem tractable in practice. Using rich administrative data from the Chilean school choice system, the framework demonstrates how adding a limited number of seats can trigger improvement chains benefiting multiple students, also revealing diminishing marginal returns to capacity expansion. Beyond the Chilean context, the framework provides a versatile toolkit that can be adapted to other constrained allocation problems, offering a rigorous foundation for data-driven policy design in education and beyond.