Speaker: Zhangjun, professor at Nanjing Audit University

Date: March 31, 2023

Time: 15:30-17:00

Location: Zhixin Building, Block B, 321

Sponsor: School of Economics, Shandong University

Abstract:

The college admission system of China has used a two-stage procedure for two decades: the first stage sends each student’s application to most colleges; the second stage assigns each applicant to various majors. Students who are rejected in the second stage cannot go back to the first stage to apply for other colleges, which incentivizes students to accept options called major transfer in their rank-order lists. This incentive can distort students’ preferences and cause strategic reports. We demonstrate the deficiencies of the two-stage procedure and for the currently used procedure called Chinese Parallel Mechanism (CPM), we propose an improvement (RPM) that essentially runs the deferred acceptance algorithm that has been used by some provinces of China. However, most provinces still prefer CPM over IPM, which is probably because they want to avoid radical changes in the reform. We run lab experiments to compare the three mechanisms (CPM, RPM, IPM). Experiments support RPM as an appealing mechanism for both students and colleges and as a practical solution for provinces; the three mechanisms are close in efficiency, while RPM lies between IPM and CPM in fairness; RPM corrects students’ incentives regarding major transfer options, and avoids cutoff diversification of majors within a college relative to IPM; RPM is a minimalist redesign of CPM.

For more information, please visit:

https://www.view.sdu.edu.cn/info/1020/176769.htm