Search Costs, Biased Beliefs and School Choice under Endogenous Consideration Sets
Abstract
The project will use experimental methods to study the reasons parents make school choices with very little information about options available to them. The research will study the relative importance of two mechanisms through which this occurs: i) difficulty and cost of acquiring information about school characteristics, or ii) families have incorrect beliefs about the distribution of schools, believing that schools are more similar than they are. The research will develop a theoretical model based on parents beliefs about school quality and how these beliefs change as they receive new information. The research will then test this theory by providing different amounts of information to parents to see how this affects their school choice decisions. The pilot RCT was conducted in 2017 in Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic. This research is now funded by the National Science Foundation grant 1919504 and the first research output from this project is titled Search Costs, Biased Beliefs and School Choice under Endogenous Consideration Sets, coauthored with Adam Kapor, Claudia Allende and Patrick Agte.
Graphs From the Paper
- Coauthors: Adam Kapor, Claudia Allende and Patrick Agte
- Date: 2017
