Review of Economic Studies · 2025 · Kala Krishna、Sergey Lychagin、Wojciech Olszewski、Ron Siegel、Chloe Tergiman
中文摘要
许多国家以统一组织的考试作为大学招生依据。学生投入大量资源以提高考试成绩，而这些活动所带来的高昂成本日益引发担忧。我们考虑通过引入成绩披露政策对考试进行调整，将若干成绩排名区间加以合并披露。区间合并会影响学生与大学之间的均衡配置，使部分学生受损、另一些学生受益，同时也会影响学生的努力程度。我们考察此类政策如何在帕累托意义上改善学生福利，研究区间合并政策的帕累托前沿，并识别出对大学招生名额分布具有稳健性的改进方案。我们利用土耳其大学招生数据进行实证估计，以说明研究结果的潜在适用性。基于估计参数，我们发现在这一竞争中，将表现最低的一大部分学生合并披露的政策可实现帕累托改进。基于估计参数开展的实验室实验总体上支持我们的理论预测。
Abstract
Abstract Many countries base college admissions on a centrally administered test. Students invest a great deal of resources to improve their performance on the test, and there is growing concern about the high costs associated with these activities. We consider modifying the test by introducing performance-disclosure policies that pool intervals of performance rankings. Pooling affects the equilibrium allocation of students to colleges, which hurts some students and benefits others, but also affects students’ effort. We investigate how such policies can improve students’ welfare in a Pareto sense, study the Pareto frontier of pooling policies, and identify improvements that are robust to the distribution of college seats. We illustrate the potential applicability of our results with an empirical estimation that uses data on college admissions in Turkey. We find that a policy that pools a large fraction of the lowest-performing students leads to a Pareto improvement in a contest based on the estimated parameters. A laboratory experiment based on the estimated parameters generally supports our theoretical predictions.