Information acquisition and provision in school choice: a theoretical investigation
研究了波士顿即时接受机制和延迟接受机制如何激励学生获取学校质量信息，并分析了信息获取成本对机制效率和福利排名的影响。
Abstract When participating in school choice, students may incur information acquisition costs to learn about school quality. This paper investigates how two popular school choice mechanisms, the (Boston) Immediate Acceptance and the Deferred Acceptance, incentivize students’ information acquisition. Specifically, we show that only the Immediate Acceptance mechanism incentivizes students to learn their own cardinal and others’ preferences. We demonstrate that information acquisition costs affect the efficiency of each mechanism and the welfare ranking between the two. In the case where everyone has the same ordinal preferences, we evaluate the welfare effects of various information provision policies by education authorities.