Abstract
Despite extensive research on the effect of relative performance feedback, a consensus on the direction and mechanics of the effect, especially in the higher education context, is far. Moreover, the role of students' prior beliefs about their performance is poorly understood. Using a large-scale survey at a big European university, we can cleanly elicit these beliefs before providing relative performance feedback to a randomly selected treatment group. By linking the survey data to administrative data, we can subsequently measure the effect on academic performance in the short- and long-run and by prior beliefs. Additionally, the treatment group has to actively decide to see the information, which allows us to analyze selection into receiving relative performance feedback. The survey context further enables us to estimate the effect of relative performance feedback on several secondary outcomes, such as competitiveness, stress, academic self-concept. Our clean experimental design using survey as well as administrative data lends itself to comprehensively analyze the effect of relative performance feedback in higher education and provide evidence on the role of prior performance beliefs.