EconPapers    
Economics at your fingertips  
 

Flipping a coin: Evidence from university applications

Nadja Dwenger, Dorothea Kübler and Georg Weizsäcker

EconStor Open Access Articles and Book Chapters, 2018, vol. 167, 240-250

Abstract: We empirically investigate the possibility that a decision maker prefers to avoid making a decision and instead delegates it to an external device, e.g., a coin flip. A large data set from the centralized clearinghouse for university admissions in Germany shows a choice pattern of applicants that is consistent with coin flipping and that entails substantial consequences for the matching outcome. In a series of experiments capturing the relevant features of university choice, participants often choose lotteries between allocations rather than certain allocations. This contradicts most theories of choice such as expected utility. A survey among university applicants links their choices to the experiments and confirms that the choice of random allocations is intentional

Keywords: preference for randomization; matching markets; individual decision making; university admissions (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D01 D03 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2018
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (11)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.econstor.eu/bitstream/10419/209666/1/F ... -Flipping-a-coin.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: Flipping a coin: Evidence from university applications (2018) Downloads
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:zbw:espost:209666

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in EconStor Open Access Articles and Book Chapters from ZBW - Leibniz Information Centre for Economics Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by ZBW - Leibniz Information Centre for Economics ().

 
Page updated 2025-03-20
Handle: RePEc:zbw:espost:209666