Information acquisition and provision in school choice: An experimental study
通过实验室实验，研究了即时接受机制和延迟接受机制如何影响学生获取学校信息的意愿，发现学生倾向于过度投资信息获取，而免费提供信息能提高收益和配置效率。
When participating in school choice, students often spend substantial effort acquiring information about schools. We investigate how two popular mechanisms incentivize students' information acquisition in the laboratory. While students' willingness to pay for information is significantly greater under the Immediate than the Deferred Acceptance mechanism, most students over-invest in information acquisition, especially when they are more curious or believe that others invest more. Additionally, some students never invest in information acquisition but benefit equally from information provision. Both free provision and costly acquisition of information on students' own preferences increase their payoffs and allocative efficiency, whereas provision of information that helps students better assessing admission chances reduces wasteful investments. Our results also suggest that agents' information preferences, such as curiosity, can play an important role in market design theory and policy.