Events

Professor Shane Wang
Co-Director of Sponsored Research and Executive Education
Professor of Marketing
Pamplin College of Business, Virginia Tech University

ABSTRACT

We investigate how information shapes strategic ranked choice updating and allocation outcomes in high-stakes, competitive environments. We study a unique information provision event in China’s College Entrance Examination (Gaokao), in which a university invites all potential applicants to participate in a mock major rank order list (ROL) submission and subsequently provides personalized relative-position information. Using administrative data that tracks individuals’ ROLs before and after intervention for all mock participants and realized admission outcomes for admitted students, we show that relative-position information induces directional choice updating: individuals receiving positive information revise more aggressively, while those receiving negative information become more conservative, amplifying stratification. These behavioral responses exhibit substantial heterogeneity and translate into a trade-off between admitted major quality and ordinal matching outcomes through endogenous ROL updating. Moreover, when participation is endogenous, individuals who participate in the information provision but do not ultimately include the university in their final submission (“ghost competitors”) distort information signals, causing transparency to backfire. Our findings highlight both the power and limits of personalized information and underscore the importance of accounting for strategic behavior and participation dynamics in information design for centralized matching markets.