Misperceived Preferences in Joint Decisions: Evidence from a Field Experiment on Parent-Child School Choice

Parents were shown their child's school ranking alongside their own ideal ranking when completing an online survey about intended high school applications. In the treatment group, parents were explicitly told that the second ranking was their child's personal ranking. In the control group, parents were shown the same ranking but told it was a reference ranking from other study participants. Both groups then reported their intended application ranking. The goal was to vary only the perceived relevance of the information about children's preferences, while holding potential anchoring effects constant.

The intervention was embedded within a multi-step data collection process. First, children's school rankings were elicited in school classrooms without parental presence. Parents then completed an online survey from home within three days, reporting their ideal ranking and then their intended application ranking after seeing the two rankings displayed side by side. Treatment assignment was randomized at the time of the parent survey, stratified by child gender. Several weeks later, parents were recontacted and asked to upload a screenshot of their official ranking submitted to the Ministry of Education.

2024-05-01

2024-08-01

The primary outcome is the Kendall-Tau (K-T) distance between the parent's intended (and later official) application ranking and the child's reported school ranking, measuring parent-child alignment in the submitted application.

The K-T distance is computed as the share of school pairs whose relative ordering differs between two rankings — i.e., the probability that two randomly selected schools are ordered inconsistently across the two rankings. Values closer to zero indicate greater alignment. The outcome is computed both for the parent's immediately stated intended ranking and for the official ranking subsequently submitted to the Ministry of Education.

(1) K-T distance restricted to school pairs involving the child's top choices (top 3 and top 5). (2) L1 distance measuring positional displacement of the child's top-ranked schools in the parent's final ranking. (3) Share of parents placing the child's top-choice school at the top of their own ranking. (4) K-T distance for academic–vocational school pairs specifically. (5) Accuracy of parents' incentivized guesses of their child's ranking (K-T distance between parent's guess and child's true ranking). (6) Degree to which parents underestimate parent-child preference misalignment.

The top-choice K-T and L1 distances restrict the standard K-T calculation to school pairs involving the child's top 3 or top 5 choices, to assess whether treatment effects extend to the most consequential parts of the ranking. The academic-vocational K-T distance is computed analogously but limited to pairs that cross track type (academic vs. vocational). The guess accuracy measure uses control parents' incentivized guesses compared to the child's elicited ranking. The underestimation measure compares the K-T distance between parent's ideal and child's true ranking against the K-T distance between parent's ideal and parent's guessed child's ranking.

Randomization by random number generator on qualtrics

Individual family (parent-child pair)

No

Not applicable (individual-level randomization); 281 parent-child pairs completed the parent survey across 10 participating schools

281 parent-child pairs for the intended ranking analysis

Approximately 140 control families and 134 treated families in the intended ranking sample

In many joint decisions—across families, advisorships, and teams—one party often makes a choice
that primarily affects another. When the outcome diverges from the beneficiary’s preferences, this
is often interpreted as a deliberate override. We argue this interpretation is incomplete: the decision
maker may also hold inaccurate beliefs about the beneficiary’s preferences, effectively reducing
the weight of these preferences in the final decision more than intended. We demonstrate this in
high-stakes parent–child school choice, a setting with frequent communication where meaningful
belief errors might be expected to be limited. We find parents are misinformed about their children’s
preferred schools and systematically underestimate how much their own preferences differ from those
of their children. In a field experiment that transparently reveals children’s school rankings, parents

shift their children’s school applications toward those rankings, including on key margins such as top-
choice schools and academic versus vocational tracks. Accounting for belief errors nearly triples the

inferred weight parents place on children’s preferences. Overall, our findings suggest that improving
preference transparency can have important economic consequences for joint and delegated choices.

Vidinova, Hristiana and Lenk, Alexandr, Misperceived Preferences in Joint Decisions: Evidence from a Field Experiment on Parent-Child School Choice (March 01, 2026). Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=6386158 or http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.6386158

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1nY43Sf4LwlOvG5p4DoFlAthnmddc4IwR/view