Matching mechanisms and matching quality: Evidence from a top university in China

We compare competing college admission matching mechanisms that differ in preference submission timing (pre-exam, post-exam but pre-score, or post-score) and in matching procedure (Boston (BOS) and serial dictatorship (SD) matching). Pre-exam submission asks students to submit college preferences before entrance exam scores are known, whereas post-score (post-exam) submission removes (reduces) score uncertainties. Theoretical analyses show that although mechanisms with post-score submission or SD matching are ex-post fair and efficient, they are not so ex-ante. Instead, the mechanism with pre-exam submission and BOS matching can be more fair and efficient ex-ante. These hypotheses are supported by empirical test on data from a top school at a top-ranked Chinese university with identification based on temporal and provincial changes. We find that although students admitted under the pre-exam BOS mechanism have lower college entrance exam scores than students admitted through other mechanisms on average, they exhibit similar or even better college academic performance.     

高考志愿填报机制与大学招生质量:一个基于择校机制理论的经验研究

本文关注高考志愿填报机制对优质大学学生质量的影响。我们首先论证由考前报改为考后报并引入平行志愿的改革模式可以带来事后的效率与公平("高分高就"),但未必增加事前的效率与公平("高能高就"或"高偏好高就")。基于某顶级学院的学生数据,利用各省历年志愿填报机制的变化,我们从实证上验证了这一假说:相对于考前无平行志愿的制度,该学院在考后填报制度下招收的学生高考成绩更高,但以大学学业衡量的学习能力或兴趣并没有更高。     

高考录取机制的博弈分析

本文分析了高考招生中考后知分报考录取机制下的志愿填报博弈。完全信息时这个显示偏好博弈只有唯一的纳什均衡结果,均衡是帕累托有效和公平的。但是,真实的偏好并不一定是每个考生的均衡策略,达到均衡结果需要参与人之间的协调。使用文献中的Gale-Shapley学生最优机制,真实偏好是学生的优势策略,结果也是帕累托有效、公平的。本文介绍的录取机制,对于高考录取制度的改革提供了一种可行的思路。     

Incentive Matters!—The Benefit of Reminding Students About Their Academic Standing in Introductory Economics Courses

In this article, the authors illustrate how incentives can improve student performance in introductory economics courses. They implemented a policy experiment in a large introductory economics class in which they reminded students who scored below an announced cutoff score on the midterm exam about the risk of failing the course. The authors employed a regression-discontinuity method to estimate the causal impact of their policy on students’ performance on the final exam. The results suggest that the policy had a significant impact on students’ performance on the final exam. In fact, the gain in test scores was sufficient to boost a student's overall course grade by one letter grade.     

Preference submission timing in school choice matching: testing fairness and efficiency in the laboratory

We investigate the relative merits of the Boston and Serial Dictatorship mechanisms when the timing of students’ preference submission over schools varies within the structure of the mechanism. Despite the well-documented disadvantages of the Boston mechanism Abdulkadiroglu and Sonmez (American Economic Review 93:729–747 2003), we hypothesize that a Boston mechanism where students are required to submit their preferences before the realization of their exam scores, can in fact have fairness and efficiency advantages compared to the often favored Serial Dictatorship mechanism. We test these hypotheses in a series of laboratory experiments which vary by the class of mechanism implemented, and the preference submission timing by students, reflective of actual policy changes which have occurred in China. Our experimental findings confirm the efficiency hypothesis straightforwardly, and lend support to the fairness hypothesis when subjects have the chance to learn with experience. The results have important policy implications for school choice mechanism design when students’ relative rankings by schools are initially uncertain.     

高考录取机制的博弈分析

本文分析了高考招生中考后知分报考录取机制下的志愿填报博弈。完全信息时这个显示偏好博弈只有唯一的纳什均衡结果，均衡是帕累托有效和公平的。但是，真实的偏好并不一定是每个考生的均衡策略，达到均衡结果需要参与人之间的协调。使用文献中的Gale-Shapley学生最优机制，真实偏好是学生的优势策略，结果也是帕累托有效、公平的。本文介绍的录取机制，对于高考录取制度的改革提供了一种可行的思路。     

Scheduled to Gain: Short- and Longer-Run Educational Effects of Examination Scheduling*

In this paper, I present findings concerning the effect of examination scheduling on high-stakes exam scores and longer-run outcomes. I show that random variations in examination schedules, which increase the time students have to prepare, have positive effects on exam scores. The effect is highly concave, and stronger for females and in quantitative subjects. I trace the effects of preparation time into tertiary education outcomes, finding significant effects for female students on the extensive and intensive margins. I show how easily exam scores and, consequently, longer-run outcomes are affected by a random institutional factor unrelated to student ability.     

Constrained school choice

Recently, several school districts in the US have adopted or consider adopting the Student-Optimal Stable mechanism or the Top Trading Cycles mechanism to assign children to public schools. There is evidence that for school districts that employ (variants of) the so-called Boston mechanism the transition would lead to efficiency gains. The first two mechanisms are strategy-proof, but in practice student assignment procedures typically impede a student to submit a preference list that contains all his acceptable schools. We study the preference revelation game where students can only declare up to a fixed number of schools to be acceptable. We focus on the stability and efficiency of the Nash equilibrium outcomes. Our main results identify rather stringent necessary and sufficient conditions on the priorities to guarantee stability or efficiency of either of the two mechanisms. This stands in sharp contrast with the Boston mechanism which has been abandoned in many US school districts but nevertheless yields stable Nash equilibrium outcomes.     

The Effect of Attending a Small Class in the Early Grades on College-test Taking and Middle School Test Results: Evidence from Project Star

This paper provides a long-term follow-up analysis of students who participated in the Tennessee STAR experiment. In this experiment, students and their teachers were randomly assigned to small, regular-size, or regular-size classes with a teacher aide in the first four years of school. We analyse the effect of past attendance in small classes on student test scores and whether they took the ACT or SAT college entrance exam. Attending a small class in the early grades is associated with an increased likelihood of taking a college-entrance exam, especially among minority students, and somewhat higher test scores.     

Preference intensities and risk aversion in school choice: a laboratory experiment

We experimentally investigate in the laboratory prominent mechanisms that are employed in school choice programs to assign students to public schools and study how individual behavior is influenced by preference intensities and risk aversion. Our main results show that (a) the Gale–Shapley mechanism is more robust to changes in cardinal preferences than the Boston mechanism independently of whether individuals can submit a complete or only a restricted ranking of the schools and (b) subjects with a higher degree of risk aversion are more likely to play “safer” strategies under the Gale–Shapley but not under the Boston mechanism. Both results have important implications for enrollment planning and the possible protection risk averse agents seek.     

Proper belief revision and equilibrium in dynamic games

We present a theory of rationality in dynamic games in which players, during the course of the game, may revise their beliefs about the opponents’ utility functions. The theory is based upon the following three principles: (1) the players’ initial beliefs about the opponents’ utilities should agree on some profile u of utility functions, (2) every player should believe, at each of his information sets, that his opponents are carrying out optimal strategies and (3) a player at information set h should not change his belief about an opponent's ranking of strategies a and b if both a and b could have led to h. Scenarios with these properties are called preference conjecture equilibria for the profile u of utility functions. We show that every normal form proper equilibrium for u induces a preference conjecture equilibrium for u, thus implying existence of preference conjecture equilibrium.     

Strategic information transmission networks

We study a model of multi-player communication. Privately informed decision makers have different preferences about the actions they take, and communicate to influence each others? actions in their favor. We prove that the equilibrium capability of any player to send a truthful message to a set of players depends not only on the preference composition of those players, but also on the number of players truthfully communicating with each one of them. We establish that the equilibrium welfare depends not only on the number of truthful messages sent in equilibrium, but also on how evenly truthful messages are distributed across decision makers.     

Education production efficiency: Evidence from Brazilian universities

The purpose of this paper is to estimate the efficiency of higher education institutions in Brazil with emphasis on its determinants, taking particularly into account the relative efficiency of public and private institutions on the application of their resources. The availability of scores in standardized tests for Brazilian universities helps a lot with this task since they provide a widely accepted output measure. The difference between the scores of last-year and first-year students in ENADE is used to measure performance. There exists an entrance exam in Brazilian universities where they can screen out their students. Therefore we believe that students' characteristics should be considered a non-discretionary input and consequently explain the output. This specification implies that public institutions are more inefficient than private ones.     

Beliefs and Public Good Provision with Anonymous Contributors

We analyze a static game of public good contributions where finitely many anonymous players have heterogeneous preferences about the public good and heterogeneous beliefs about the distribution of preferences. In the unique symmetric equilibrium, the only individuals who make positive contributions are those who most value the public good and who are also the most pessimistic; that is, according to their beliefs, the proportion of players who most like the public good is smaller than it would be according to any other possible belief. We predict whether the aggregate contribution is larger or smaller than it would be in an analogous game with complete information and heterogeneous preferences, by comparing the beliefs of contributors with the true distribution of preferences. A trade‐off between preferences and beliefs arises if there is no individual who simultaneously has the highest preference type and the most pessimistic belief. In this case, there is a symmetric equilibrium, and multiple symmetric equilibria occur only if there are more than two preference types.     

Technical change and employment under imperfect competition with perfect and imperfect information

We consider the implications of process innovation for the aggregate level of employment of assuming that not all firms adopt new technologies simultaneously and that non-innovators adopt (temporarily)disequilibrium strategies (due to imperfect information about the introduction of the new technology). Two alternative scenarios are explored. In one, consumers' demands arise from symmetric homothetic preferences, and in the other from asymmetric (Hotelling-type) preferences. We find that there may be a reduction in employment in the transition to the new equilibrium under both types of preferences even if there is no decrease (or an increase) in the new (long-run) equilibrium level of employment. The conditions under which this will occur are however different for the alternative preference structures. Further, the latter are shown to have different implications for theequilibrium effects of process innovation.     

On the existence of a strictly strong Nash equilibrium under the student-optimal deferred acceptance algorithm

This study analyzes a preference revelation game in the student-optimal deferred acceptance algorithm in a college admission problem. We assume that each college's true preferences are known publicly, and analyze the strategic behavior of students. We demonstrate the existence of a strictly strong Nash equilibrium in the preference revelation game through a simple algorithm that finds it. Specifically, (i) the equilibrium outcome from our algorithm is the same matching as in the efficiency-adjusted deferred acceptance algorithm and (ii) in a one-to-one matching market, it coincides with the student-optimal von Neumann–Morgenstern (vNM) stable matching. We also show that (i) when a strict core allocation in a housing market derived from a college admission market exists, it can be supported by a strictly strong Nash equilibrium, and (ii) there exists a strictly strong Nash equilibrium under the college-optimal deferred acceptance algorithm if and only if the student-optimal stable matching is Pareto-efficient for students.     

The strategic sincerity of Approval voting

We show that Approval voting need not trigger sincere behavior in equilibrium of Poisson voting games and hence might lead a strategic voter to skip a candidate preferred to his worst preferred approved candidate. We identify two main rationales for these violations of sincerity. First, if a candidate has no votes, a voter might skip him. Notwithstanding, we provide sufficient conditions on the voters’ preference intensities to remove this sort of insincerity. On the contrary, if the candidate gets a positive share of the votes, a voter might skip him solely on the basis of his ordinal preferences. This second type of insincerity is a consequence of the correlation of the candidates’ scores. The incentives for sincerity of rank scoring rules are also discussed.     

中国城镇住房市场定价行为研究

本文利用完全信息混合战略动态博弈方法对中国城镇住房市场销售者与购买者交易过程进行博弈分析。根据精炼纳什均衡解,在销售者预期市场条件不变的情况下,住房最优定价由销售者交易时间贴现因子决定,且与贴现因子呈反向变化关系;在预期市场条件变化情况下,最优定价由贴现因子与市场条件变动系数共同决定。     

Qualitative valuation of environmental criteria through a group consensus based on stochastic dominance

This paper introduces a qualitative valuation method to elicit stakeholders' intensities of preferences for a complex environmental issue and multiple social groups. Environmental valuation studies have shown that in any complex environment with a diversity of environmental services, stakeholders have difficulties using a monetary valuation to make trade-offs between different environmental services. Stated preference methods such as the Contingent Valuation Method (CVM) have been criticised for their individualistic format and assumptions of commensurability between environmental criteria. To alleviate both of these criticisms, we propose a qualitative valuation method. The method contains a discursive step to allow stakeholders to discuss and construct a list of environmental criteria and alternative plans. The list of criteria and plans is subsequently used by a group of experts to formulate an Impact Matrix (IM), which is to be used in the succeeding individualistic steps of the methodology. The first individualistic step consists of asking the stakeholders to rank Alternative Impacts (AIs) in the IM for each single criterion. The stakeholders are then asked to express intensities of their preferences through pairwise comparisons between the AIs of the constructed rank order on each single criterion. These intensities are expressed on a qualitative scale. Subsequently, to provide social intensities of preferences, a social preference (social rank order) is first determined for each single criterion. We propose to use the median value among the intensities of preferences as the social intensity of preference by assuming interpersonal comparability and taking into account stochastic monotonocity. This is a pre-processing step, which allows us to reach social intensities of preferences in the Lar rangeland (Iran), where several social groups have conflicting interests on rangeland services, leading to conflicting preferences on environmental criteria.     

Sorting and inequality in Canadian schools

A student's peers are often thought to influence his or her educational outcomes. If so, an unequal distribution of advantaged and disadvantaged students across schools (“sorting”) in a community will amplify existing inequalities. This paper explores the relationship between the degree of sorting across schools within a community and educational inequality as measured by the variance of standardized high school exam scores within the community. Cross-sectional OLS estimates suggest that the variance of test scores is related to sorting by ethnicity, but not to sorting by income or parental education. We then implement two strategies for addressing endogeneity in the degree of sorting: a standard unobserved effects (first-difference) approach, and a first-difference/instrumental variables approach in which the structure of school choice (number and relative size of schools) is used to construct instruments for the degree of sorting. The results from both approaches indicate that the variance of test scores is related to sorting by home language and parental education, but not to sorting by income. Our results also suggest that reducing sorting would have little effect on inequality of outcomes in the typical Alberta community, but would have substantial effects in the larger cities.