Original title: Priority Transparency, Admission Chances, and Information Acquisition in School Choice
Georgy Artemov, Siqi Pan · August 2026
When applying to schools, students must decide whether to spend effort learning which schools they actually like best. Researchers examined how revealing students' priority status and admission chances affects this decision. In theory, revealing everything concentrates learning only among high-priority students, because low-priority students get discouraged. Under this theory, partially hiding priorities should spread out learning and create higher overall welfare. But in laboratory experiments, full disclosure actually produced the highest welfare, followed by partial disclosure, and finally no disclosure. Total transparency helped participants better understand their strategic setting and make fewer mistakes. Even so, people still made learning errors under full transparency. Specifically, subjects reacted poorly when given admission chances directly rather than inferring them. This shows that helping students understand their actual chances remains an important policy challenge.
Imagine you and your friends are deciding which food truck to visit, but none of you knows for sure which one you'll like. If you taste a sample, you might discover you prefer a different truck, freeing up space at the popular one. But if you know you're first in line, you're more likely to taste because you can easily get your choice. If you know you're last, you might not bother. In this paper, the researchers test whether telling students their exact spot in line versus just a range changes how many bother to learn what schools they actually prefer, and how that affects everyone's satisfaction.
School choice and college admissions affect millions of students. This research shows that being open about a student's priority and admission chances helps them make better decisions and reduces mistakes, even though theory suggested hiding some information would be better. Policymakers should prioritize full transparency but also help students interpret the information they receive.
The abstract notes that even with full transparency, some learning deviations persist because subjects do not respond optimally when admission chances are given directly rather than inferred. The experimental results contradict the theoretical prediction, suggesting the model may oversimplify behavior. Additionally, the ability of students to interpret disclosed information remains a policy concern, implying that simply providing data is not enough—how it is presented and understood matters.
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Priority Transparency, Admission Chances, and Information Acquisition in School Choice — Georgy Artemov, Siqi Pan
Abstract licence: CC0
Explanation generated by Synthesis from the abstract — it is not the original paper. This is a preprint, so it hasn't necessarily been peer reviewed.