Abstract
We study how different types of information about relative priority shape preference reporting under the student-proposing Deferred Acceptance (DA) mechanism, focusing on whether information affects participants’ beliefs about their admission chances and, in turn, their reporting behavior. To address this question, we implement a laboratory school choice experiment in which four students compete for four schools, each with a capacity of one seat. Students have strict preferences over schools: they earn 15 EUR for their top choice, 11 EUR for their second choice, 8 EUR for their third choice, and 4 EUR for their least preferred choice. Schools rank students based on randomly assigned admission scores that determine priority.
In each round, participants first submit an initial rank-order list (ROL), then receive treatment-specific information, and finally submit a revised, payoff-relevant ROL. Each session is assigned to one of six treatment cells in a 3 × 2 design that crosses three information environments with two competition regimes. The information treatments are: (1) admission score disclosure, where participants observe all group members’ admission scores; (2) historical cutoff information, where participants observe the previous round’s minimum score required for admission to their highest-paying school; and (3) potential acceptance, where participants receive an individualized signal indicating whether they would be admitted to their highest-paying school if they ranked it first, holding others’ initial ROLs fixed. The competition regimes vary in the number of students competing for the same highest-paying school. In the full-competition regime, all four students share the same highest-paying school. In the medium-competition regime, two students compete for one of the highest-paying schools, and the other two compete for another.
Our main behavioral outcome is top-choice reporting, defined as ranking the highest-paying school first.
The experiment is conducted at the Laboratorio de Economía Experimental (LEE) at the University Jaume I in Castellón, Spain, in six sessions with 80 participants each. Each participant makes eight decisions, yielding 3,840 observations.