Majority Vote on Educational Standards

Robert Schwager

VfS Annual Conference 2013 (Duesseldorf): Competition Policy and Regulation in a Global Economic Order from Verein für Socialpolitik / German Economic Association

Abstract: The direct democratic choice of an examination standard, i.e., a performance level required to graduate, is evaluated against a utilitarian welfare function. It is shown that the median preferred standard is inefficiently low if the marginal cost of reaching a higher performance reacts more sensitively to ability for high than for low abilities, and if the right tail of the ability distribution is longer than the left tail. Moreover, a high number of agents who choose not to graduate may imply that the median preferred standard is inefficiently low even if these conditions fail.

JEL-codes: D72 I21 I28 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2013
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-edu and nep-pol
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Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:zbw:vfsc13:79971

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