Two-stage Chinese College Admission

时间：4月13日（周四）10:30 a.m.-12:00

地点：经院302教室

主讲人：张军

主持老师：吴泽南，石凡奇（经院）；胡岠（国发院）

参与老师：胡涛，吴泽南，石凡奇（经院）；汪浩，胡岠（国发院）；翁翕（光华）

摘要：The college admission system of China has used a two-stage procedure for decades: the first stage sends each student’s application to at most one college; the second stage assigns each college’s applicants to its majors. Students who are rejected in the second stage cannot go back to the first stage to apply for other colleges, which incentivizes students to accept options called major transfer in their rank-order lists.  This incentive can distort students’ preferences and cause strategic reports. We demonstrate the deficiencies of the two-stage procedure and for the currently used procedure called Chinese Parallel Mechanism (CPM). We propose an improvement (RPM) by combining the two stages into one stage. We also document the most recent reform in the system and notice that a new mechanism (IPM) that essentially runs the deferred acceptance algorithm has been used by some provinces of China. However, most provinces still prefer CPM over IPM, which is probably because they want to avoid radical changes in the reform. We run lab experiments to compare the three mechanisms (CPM, RPM, IPM). Experiments support RPM as an appealing mechanism for both students and colleges and as a practical solution for provinces: the three mechanisms are close in efficiency, while RPM compromises between IPM and CPM in terms of fairness and college-wide advantage; RPM corrects students’ incentive regarding major transfer options; RPM is a minimalist redesign of CPM.

主讲人介绍：Jun Zhang is Professor of Economics at Nanjing Audit University. He works on market design theory and application, with publications in American Economic Review, Journal of Economic Theory, Games and Economic Behavior，Economic Theory, etc. His research is supported by NSFC.