The Role of Information Frictions in Study Habit Choice and Academic Performance

Agustina Affonso, Esteban Aucejo, Stephanie El Khoury and Tomás Larroucau

No 35436, NBER Working Papers from National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc

Abstract: We study whether information frictions about the relative effectiveness of study methods distort students’ effort allocation. Standard models treat effort as a single input whose level, rather than composition, determines outcomes. We instead model effort as an allocation across methods with heterogeneous effectiveness. Combining panel surveys, administrative records, digital activity logs, and a randomized information intervention with over 2,000 undergraduates, we test whether imperfect information leads to effort misallocation and quantify consequences for performance. At baseline, students hold divergent beliefs, and many devote time to passive strategies such as rereading, despite evidence that active retrieval is more effective; these choices predict lower performance and larger self-assessment errors. We randomize treated students into general-feedback and personalized-feedback arms, benchmarking habits against peers in the latter. General feedback has little effect. Personalized feedback widens the perceived effectiveness gap between active and passive methods by 42 percent, shifts time toward effective practices, and raises exam scores by 0.05–0.08 standard deviations. A dynamic model with learning-by-doing and convex allocation costs shows that, for students with the weakest baseline beliefs, personalized feedback is equivalent to a 16.5 percent reduction in adoption costs. These results identify information frictions about multidimensional effort as a determinant of academic performance.

JEL-codes: I2 I21 I23 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2026-07
Note: ED
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.nber.org/papers/w35436.pdf (application/pdf)
Access to the full text is generally limited to series subscribers, however if the top level domain of the client browser is in a developing country or transition economy free access is provided. More information about subscriptions and free access is available at http://www.nber.org/wwphelp.html. Free access is also available to older working papers.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:nbr:nberwo:35436

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from
http://www.nber.org/papers/w35436
The price is Paper copy available by mail.

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in NBER Working Papers from National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc National Bureau of Economic Research, 1050 Massachusetts Avenue Cambridge, MA 02138, U.S.A.. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by ().