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

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.

在参与择校流程时，学生通常需要投入大量时间与精力来收集不同学校的相关信息。本研究对比了两种主流择校机制——波士顿即时接受（Boston Immediate Acceptance）机制与盖尔-沙普利延迟接受（Gale-Shapley Deferred Acceptance）机制——对学生信息收集行为的激励效应。研究结果显示，唯有即时接受机制能够激励学生同时了解自身的基数偏好与其他学生的偏好。尽管本研究的实验室实验结果与理论预测在方向上保持一致，但我们同时发现，学生往往会系统性地过度投入信息收集成本：尤其是当他们认为其他学生会投入更多精力，或是自身好奇心更强时。我们的反事实政策分析表明，即便在防策略操纵（strategy-proof）机制下，教育主管部门通过提供更多信息帮助每位学生同时了解自身与其他学生的偏好，仍能提升社会福利。此举不仅能够优化择校匹配效率，还可减少因信息过度收集造成的社会浪费性成本。