Biased Beliefs and Search in Education Markets

为一个人选择合适的学校？的孩子可以决定孩子的？未来的教育成果，但家长并不总是选择最好的学校，因为信息不足。 这项研究将使用实验方法来研究父母在几乎没有关于他们可供选择的选择的信息的情况下做出学校选择的原因。 这项研究将研究造成这种情况的两种机制的相对重要性：（一）获得有关学校特点的信息的困难和费用，和/或（二）家庭对学校的分布有错误的看法，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。 该研究将开发一个理论模型的基础上，父母？学生对学校质量的信念，以及这些信念如何随着他们接受新信息而改变。 然后，研究将通过向家长提供不同数量的信息来测试这一理论，看看这如何影响他们的择校决定。 通过比较接受信息的父母和没有接受信息的父母的结果，研究人员可以确定信息及其成本对父母学校选择的影响。 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，以及提供投入的政策，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，增加人力资本形成，最终促进经济增长。 本研究将通过调查家长在选择学校时的信息获取过程，探讨家长为什么不为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，搜索成本和搜索益处的偏见。 研究人员将使用从随机对照试验（RCT）收集的数据来测试这个模型。 实验结果，然后将被用来估计结构模型的父母教育选择合并数据的实验和行政数据的学校特点，家庭特点，信息获取成本，和学校的成果。 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。 该奖项反映了NSF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。

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.