IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/ecl/harjfk/rwp01-049.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

What Worms for the Early Bird: Early Admissions at Elite Colleges

Author

Listed:
  • Avery, Christopher

    (Harvard U)

  • Fairbanks, Andrew

    (Price Waterhouse Cooper)

  • Zeckhauser, Richard

    (Harvard U)

Abstract

Early application programs have turned the college admissions process into a highly strategic arena. It is widely believed, but seldom acknowledged by colleges, that early applicants are favored in admissions decisions. This report is a brief summary of a book that will be published by Harvard University Press. We analyze admission records from 14 highly selective colleges, finding that early applicants are significantly more likely to be admitted than are regular applicants with similar qualifications. Our interviews with college students and high school counselors demonstrate a wide range of knowledge about the nature of early applications.

Suggested Citation

  • Avery, Christopher & Fairbanks, Andrew & Zeckhauser, Richard, 2001. "What Worms for the Early Bird: Early Admissions at Elite Colleges," Working Paper Series rwp01-049, Harvard University, John F. Kennedy School of Government.
    • Handle: RePEc:ecl:harjfk:rwp01-049
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://research.hks.harvard.edu/publications/workingpapers/citation.aspx?PubId=683&type=WPN
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    References listed on IDEAS

    as
    1. Roth, Alvin E & Xing, Xiaolin, 1994. "Jumping the Gun: Imperfections and Institutions Related to the Timing of Market Transactions," American Economic Review, American Economic Association, vol. 84(4), pages 992-1044, September.
    Full references (including those not matched with items on IDEAS)

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Erev, Ido & Roth, Alvin E. & Slonim, Robert L. & Barron, Greg, 2002. "Predictive value and the usefulness of game theoretic models," International Journal of Forecasting, Elsevier, vol. 18(3), pages 359-368.
    2. Gordon Winston & David Zimmerman, 2004. "Peer Effects in Higher Education," NBER Chapters, in: College Choices: The Economics of Where to Go, When to Go, and How to Pay For It, pages 395-424, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
    3. C. Nicholas McKinney & Muriel Niederle & Alvin E. Roth, 2003. "The collapse of a medical clearinghouse (and why such failures are rare)," NBER Working Papers 9467, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
    4. Christopher Avery & Jonathan Levin, 2010. "Early Admissions at Selective Colleges," American Economic Review, American Economic Association, vol. 100(5), pages 2125-2156, December.
    5. Changhui Kang & Sam-Ho Lee, 2015. "Being Knowledgeable or Sociable? Different Patterns of Human Capital Development and Evaluation in Cognitive and Non-cognitive Skills," Korean Economic Review, Korean Economic Association, vol. 31, pages 57-87.
    6. Hashem Dezhbakhsh & John A. Karikari, 2010. "Enrollment At Highly Selective Private Colleges: Who Is Left Behind?," Contemporary Economic Policy, Western Economic Association International, vol. 28(1), pages 94-109, January.

    Most related items

    These are the items that most often cite the same works as this one and are cited by the same works as this one.
    1. Muriel Niederle & Alvin E. Roth, 2009. "The Effects of a Centralized Clearinghouse on Job Placement, Wages, and Hiring Practices," NBER Chapters, in: Studies of Labor Market Intermediation, pages 235-271, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
    2. Scott Duke Kominers & Alexander Teytelboym & Vincent P Crawford, 2017. "An invitation to market design," Oxford Review of Economic Policy, Oxford University Press and Oxford Review of Economic Policy Limited, vol. 33(4), pages 541-571.
    3. Armstrong, Mark & Zhou, Jidong, 2010. "Exploding offers and buy-now discounts," MPRA Paper 22531, University Library of Munich, Germany.
    4. Roth, Alvin E & Xing, Xiaolin, 1997. "Turnaround Time and Bottlenecks in Market Clearing: Decentralized Matching in the Market for Clinical Psychologists," Journal of Political Economy, University of Chicago Press, vol. 105(2), pages 284-329, April.
    5. Sugden, Robert & Wang, Mengjie & Zizzo, Daniel John, 2019. "Take it or leave it: Experimental evidence on the effect of time-limited offers on consumer behaviour," Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization, Elsevier, vol. 168(C), pages 1-23.
    6. Robert Kleinberg & Bo Waggoner & E. Glen Weyl, 2016. "Descending Price Optimally Coordinates Search," Papers 1603.07682, arXiv.org, revised Dec 2016.
    7. Jeremy Bulow & Jonathan Levin, 2006. "Matching and Price Competition," American Economic Review, American Economic Association, vol. 96(3), pages 652-668, June.
    8. James Boudreau & Vicki Knoblauch, 2013. "Preferences and the price of stability in matching markets," Theory and Decision, Springer, vol. 74(4), pages 565-589, April.
    9. Alexandre Belloni & Changrong Deng & Saša Pekeč, 2017. "Mechanism and Network Design with Private Negative Externalities," Operations Research, INFORMS, vol. 65(3), pages 577-594, June.
    10. Bettina Klaus & David F. Manlove & Francesca Rossi, 2014. "Matching under Preferences," Cahiers de Recherches Economiques du Département d'économie 14.07, Université de Lausanne, Faculté des HEC, Département d’économie.
    11. Mark Armstrong & Jidong Zhou, 2016. "Search Deterrence," The Review of Economic Studies, Review of Economic Studies Ltd, vol. 83(1), pages 26-57.
    12. Muriel Niederle & Alvin E. Roth, 2009. "Market Culture: How Rules Governing Exploding Offers Affect Market Performance," American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, American Economic Association, vol. 1(2), pages 199-219, August.
    13. Jens Josephson & Joel Shapiro, 2008. "Interviews and adverse selection," Economics Working Papers 1093, Department of Economics and Business, Universitat Pompeu Fabra.
    14. Alvin E. Roth, 2010. "Marketplace Institutions Related to the Timing of Transactions," NBER Working Papers 16556, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
    15. Mustafa Afacan, 2013. "The welfare effects of pre-arrangements in matching markets," Economic Theory, Springer;Society for the Advancement of Economic Theory (SAET), vol. 53(1), pages 139-151, May.
    16. Hao Li & Shewin Rosen, 1996. "Unraveling in Assignment Markets," NBER Working Papers 5729, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
    17. Yizhaq Minchuk & Aner Sela, 2018. "Asymmetric sequential search under incomplete information," Journal of Economics & Management Strategy, Wiley Blackwell, vol. 27(2), pages 315-325, June.
    18. Haeringer, Guillaume & Klijn, Flip, 2009. "Constrained school choice," Journal of Economic Theory, Elsevier, vol. 144(5), pages 1921-1947, September.
    19. Bettina Klaus & Flip Klijn, 2006. "Median Stable Matching for College Admissions," International Journal of Game Theory, Springer;Game Theory Society, vol. 34(1), pages 1-11, April.
    20. Colin von Negenborn, 2023. "The more the merrier? On the optimality of market size restrictions," Review of Economic Design, Springer;Society for Economic Design, vol. 27(3), pages 603-634, September.

    More about this item

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:ecl:harjfk:rwp01-049. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    If CitEc recognized a bibliographic reference but did not link an item in RePEc to it, you can help with this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: the person in charge (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/ksharus.html .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.