Priority Transparency, Admission Chances, and Information Acquisition in School Choice

We study, theoretically and experimentally, how transparency about students' priorities and admission chances shapes their incentives to acquire information about their own preferences in school choice and college admissions. In the model, uninformed students choose schools based on a common prior. When they learn their own preferences, their choices become more heterogeneous, which frees up seats at popular schools. Students who know they have high priority have stronger incentives to learn because they can more readily act on what they learn, whereas students who know they have low priority are discouraged. Full priority disclosure concentrates learning among high-priority students. By pooling priorities, partial disclosure spreads learning incentives to pooled students and yields higher welfare. In the laboratory, however, full disclosure yields the highest welfare instead, followed by partial disclosure, and then no disclosure, because greater transparency improves subjects' understanding of the strategic environment, leading to fewer mistakes. These findings support full disclosure of priorities or admission chances to guide information acquisition. However, deviations in learning remain even under greater priority transparency, partly because subjects respond suboptimally to admission chances when these are provided directly rather than inferred. Students' ability to interpret and use them is therefore itself a policy concern.