Related papers: Tuition too high? Blame competition
The partition of society into groups, polarization, and social networks are part of most conversations today. How do they influence price competition? We discuss Bertrand duopoly equilibria with demand subject to network effects. Contrary…
Reasoning about agent preferences on a set of alternatives, and the aggregation of such preferences into some social ranking is a fundamental issue in reasoning about uncertainty and multi-agent systems. When the set of agents and the set…
Most modern systems strive to learn from interactions with users, and many engage in exploration: making potentially suboptimal choices for the sake of acquiring new information. We initiate a study of the interplay between exploration and…
In university programs and curricula, in general we react to the need to meet market needs. We respond to market stimulus, or at least try to do so. Consider now an inverted view. Consider our data and perspectives in university programs as…
In the name of meritocracy, modern economies devote increasing amounts of resources to quantifying and ranking the performance of individuals and organisations. Rankings send out powerful signals, which lead to identify the actions of top…
We revisit the classic job-market signaling model of \cite{spence1973job}, introducing profit-seeking schools as intermediaries that design the mapping from candidates' efforts to job-market signals. Each school commits to an attendance fee…
Most online platforms strive to learn from interactions with users, and many engage in exploration: making potentially suboptimal choices for the sake of acquiring new information. We study the interplay between exploration and competition:…
What is the optimal order in which a researcher should submit their papers to journals of differing quality? I analyze a sequential search model without recall where the researcher's expected value from journal submission depends on the…
Many U.S. colleges now use test-optional admissions. A frequent claim is that by not seeing standardized test scores, a college can admit a student body it prefers, say with more diversity. But how can observing less information improve…
We consider a many-to-one matching market where colleges share true preferences over students but make decisions using only independent noisy rankings. Each student has a true value $v$, but each college $c$ ranks the student according to…
Within the framework of Game Theory, contests study decision-making in those situations or conflicts when rewards depend on the relative rank between contenders rather than their absolute performance. By relying on the formalism of Tullock…
The rise of algorithmic pricing in online retail platforms has attracted significant interest in how autonomous software agents interact under competition. This article explores the potential emergence of algorithmic collusion -…
The phenomenon of rankings is intimately related with the government interest in fiscalizing the research outputs of universities. New forms of managerialism have been introduced into the higher education system, leading to an increasing…
University course ranking forums are a popular means of disseminating information about satisfaction with the quality of course content and instruction, especially with undergraduate students. A variety of policy decisions by university…
Colleges and universities use predictive analytics in a variety of ways to increase student success rates. Despite the potential for predictive analytics, two major barriers exist to their adoption in higher education: (a) the lack of…
Scientific research funding is allocated largely through a system of soliciting and ranking competitive grant proposals. In these competitions, the proposals themselves are not the deliverables that the funder seeks, but instead are used by…
We study the design of effort-maximizing grading schemes between agents with private abilities. Assuming agents derive value from the information their grade reveals about their ability, we find that more informative grading schemes induce…
We study the effect of interim feedback policies in a dynamic all-pay auction where two players bid over two stages to win a common-value prize. We show that sequential equilibrium outcomes are characterized by Cheapest Signal Equilibria,…
Reward schemes may affect not only agents' effort, but also their incentives to gather information to reduce the riskiness of the productive activity. In a laboratory experiment using a novel task, we find that the relationship between…
Higher education systems in competitive environments generally present top universities, that are able to attract top scientists, top students and public and private financing, with notable socio-economic benefits in their region. The same…