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.