Biased Beliefs and Search in Education Markets

教育市场中的偏见信念和搜索

• 批准号: 1919504
• 负责人: Adam Kapor
• 金额: $ 55.86万
• 依托单位: Princeton University
• 依托单位国家: 美国
• 项目类别: Standard Grant
• 财政年份: 2019
• 资助国家: 美国
• 起止时间: 2019-09-01 至 2023-08-31
• 项目状态: 已结题
• 来源: https://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward?AWD_ID=1919504&HistoricalAwards=false
• 关键词: Biased; Beliefs; Search; Education; Markets

Choosing the right school for one?s child may determine the child?s future educational outcomes, yet parents do not always choose the best schools because of inadequate information. This research 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, and/or (ii) families have incorrect beliefs about the distribution of schools, believing that all schools are the same. Each of these mechanisms has a different policy implication. The research will develop a theoretical model based on parent?s 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. Comparing outcomes for parents who receive information to those of parents who do not receive information allows the researchers to determine the effects of information and its costs on parental school choice. The results of this study will provide a better understanding of why parents do not always choose the best schools as well as provide inputs into policies to improve parental school choice. The results will also help improve school and education policies, increase human capital formation, and ultimately economic growth. This proposed research will examine why parents may not choose the best schools for their children by investigating the process of information acquisition to make school choices. The researchers will develop a structural model of sequential search which allows for biased beliefs about school characteristics, search costs, and the benefits of search. The researchers will test this model using data collected from a randomized control trial (RCT). The experimental results will then be used to estimate the structural model on parental educational choice using merged data from the experiment and administrative data on school characteristics, family characteristics, cost of information acquisition, and school outcomes. The results of this research will provide important inputs into parental education decisions, improve educational outcomes and ultimately increase the stock of human capital and economic growth in the US. The results will also establish the US as a global leader in research on parental school decisions.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.

为自己选择合适的学校？孩子可以决定孩子吗？然而，由于信息不足，家长并不总是选择最好的学校。本研究将采用实验方法来研究家长在对学校知之甚少的情况下选择学校的原因。该研究将研究导致这种情况发生的两种机制的相对重要性：(i)获取学校特征信息的难度和成本，和/或（ii）家庭对学校分布的错误看法，认为所有学校都是一样的。每一种机制都有不同的政策含义。本研究将建立一个基于亲子关系的理论模型。美国人对学校质量的看法，以及这些看法在接受新信息时如何改变。然后，研究将通过向家长提供不同数量的信息来检验这一理论，以了解这些信息如何影响他们的择校决定。通过比较接受信息的父母和未接受信息的父母的结果，研究人员可以确定信息对父母择校的影响及其成本。这项研究的结果将提供一个更好的理解为什么家长不总是选择最好的学校，并提供政策投入，以改善家长的学校选择。研究结果还将有助于改善学校和教育政策，促进人力资本形成，并最终促进经济增长。本研究将通过调查孩子在选择学校时的信息获取过程，来研究为什么家长不能为他们的孩子选择最好的学校。研究人员将开发一个顺序搜索的结构模型，该模型允许对学校特征、搜索成本和搜索收益的偏见信念。研究人员将使用从随机对照试验（RCT）中收集的数据来测试该模型。然后，将实验结果与学校特征、家庭特征、信息获取成本和学校成果的管理数据合并，用于估计家长教育选择的结构模型。这项研究的结果将为父母的教育决策提供重要的投入，改善教育成果，并最终增加美国的人力资本存量和经济增长。研究结果还将确立美国在父母择校研究方面的全球领先地位。该奖项反映了美国国家科学基金会的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的知识价值和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估，被认为值得支持。