Data and Code for: Information Acquisition and Provision in School Choice: An Experimental Study

Principal Investigator(s):  View help for Principal Investigator(s) Yan Chen, University of Michigan; YingHua He, Rice University

Version:  View help for Version V1

Name File Type Size Last Modified
  replication_package 09/27/2022 11:08:PM
Chen_He_2021_09_Online_Appendix.pdf application/pdf 574.9 KB 09/26/2022 06:38:PM
Chen_He_Information acquisition and provision in school choice An experimental study.pdf application/pdf 644.1 KB 09/28/2022 08:39:AM

Project Citation: 

Chen, Yan, and He, YingHua. Data and Code for: Information Acquisition and Provision in School Choice: An Experimental Study. Ann Arbor, MI: Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research [distributor], 2022-09-28. https://doi.org/10.3886/E119483V1

Project Description

Summary:  View help for Summary When participating in the school choice process, students often spend substantial time and effort acquiring information about different schools. In this study, we compare how two popular school choice mechanisms, the (Boston) Immediate Acceptance and the (Gale-Shapley) Deferred Acceptance, incentivize students’ information acquisition. Our results show that only the Immediate Acceptance mechanism incentivizes students to learn their own cardinal and others’ preferences. While our lab experiment yields results directionally consistent with our theoretical predictions, we also find that students systematically over-invest in information acquisition, especially when they believe that others invest more and when they are more curious. Our counterfactual policy analyses suggest that it is welfare-enhancing for educational authorities to provide more information to help each student learn both her own and others’ preferences, even under strategy-proof mechanisms. Doing so improves match efficiency while reducing the socially wasteful costs of information over-acquisition.

Scope of Project

Subject Terms:  View help for Subject Terms Information Acquisition; Information Provision; School Choice; Experiment
Geographic Coverage:  View help for Geographic Coverage Michigan
Universe:  View help for Universe University of Michigan students

Methodology

Sampling:  View help for Sampling Subjects recruited using ORSEE

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Published Versions

V1 [2022-09-28]

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