Despite a robust college premium, college attendance rates in the United States have remained stagnant and exhibit a substantial socioeconomic gradient. We focus on information gaps — specifically, incomplete information about college benefits and costs — as a potential explanation for these...

In a school choice mechanism, school priorities are often based on student exam scores, by which student true ability may not be perfectly revealed. An ex-post fair matching mechanism (for example, Serial Dictatorship) can be undesirable in that it is not ex-ante fair: it may not match students...

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, 2003),...

Researchers commonly "shrink" raw quality measures based on statistical criteria. This paper studies when and how this transformation's statistical properties would confer economic benefits to a utility‐maximizing decision‐maker across common asymmetric information environments. I develop...

We examine how peers influence the allegiances of West Point cadets in the American Civil War. Specifically, we analyze how quasi-random variations in the proportion of cadets from northern (low-slave) states influenced the decisions of cadets in choosing which army to join. A higher proportion...

Foreign Policy considerations today often include or affect science or scientific matters. In the United States decisions are based on an ad hoc response to situational issues. By comparison, in the last two decades several countries have made a concerted effort to focus on science and...

In a college admission mechanism, students are often matched with colleges by using a noisy signal of their true abilities (e.g., their exam scores). The matching outcome thus may be imperfect in terms of ex-ante fairness, which suggests matching students with higher ability to better colleges....

Universities are long-established organisations, and although they have reinvented themselves several times, major reforms are needed again, underpinned by systematic prospective analyses. A novel method is needed to take into account the wide-ranging and complex factors, shaping the future of...

Despite a robust college premium, college attendance rates in the US have remained stagnant and exhibit a substantial socioeconomic gradient. We focus on information gaps – specifically, incomplete information about college benefits and costs – as a potential explanation for these patterns....

Sequential choices are ubiquitous in daily life, yet making optimal decisions in such settings--where properly accounting for option value is crucial--can be challenging. This paper provides field experimental evidence on the neglect of option value in high-stakes decisions and quantifies the...