Information acquisition and provision in school choice: An experimental study

• 成果类型: Article
• 署名作者: Chen, Yan; He, YingHua
• 署名单位: University of Michigan System; University of Michigan; Tsinghua University; Rice University
• 刊物名称: JOURNAL OF ECONOMIC THEORY
• ISSN/ISSBN: 0022-0531
• DOI: 10.1016/j.jet.2021.105345
• 发表日期: 2021
• 关键词: information acquisition; Information provision; school choice; experiment

摘要

When participating in school choice, students often spend substantial effort acquiring information about schools. We investigate how two popular mechanisms incentivize students' information acquisition in the laboratory. While students' willingness to pay for information is significantly greater under the Immediate than the Deferred Acceptance mechanism, most students over-invest in information acquisition, especially when they are more curious or believe that others invest more. Additionally, some students never invest in information acquisition but benefit equally from information provision. Both free provision and costly acquisition of information on students' own preferences increase their payoffs and allocative efficiency, whereas provision of information that helps students better assessing admission chances reduces wasteful investments. Our results also suggest that agents' information preferences, such as curiosity, can play an important role in market design theory and policy. (c) 2021 The Author(s). Published by Elsevier Inc.