Date & Time: Cincinnati (10 am), Los Angeles (7 am), Bath (3 pm), Munich (4 pm), Beijing (10 pm), Singapore (10 pm), Sydney (April 28, 12 am)

Ron Siegel will present the paper titled "Pareto Improvements in the Contest for College Admissions" (joint work with Wojciech Olszewski, Chloe Tergiman, Sergey Lychagin, and Kala Krishna).

Abstract of the Paper:
Many countries base college admissions on a centrally-administered test. There is growing concern about the cost of test-preparation activities students engage in to improve their performance on the test. We investigate how pooling intervals of performance ranking can improve students' welfare in a Pareto sense. Pooling affects the equilibrium allocation of students to colleges, which hurts some students and benefits others, but also affects the costly effort students exert. We characterize the Pareto frontier of Pareto improving policies and identify improvements that are robust to the distribution of college seats. We then calibrate the model using data on Turkish college admissions among science track students and explore Pareto-improving policies of student assignment. Finally, we conduct an experiment based on the calibrated model to test students’ responses to pooling colleges.

Chair: Dan Kovenock, Co-Chair: Iryna Topolyan