Performance in Pass-Fail Assessments
Giuseppe Bertola
No 11055, CESifo Working Paper Series from CESifo
Abstract:
Trading the cost of better performance off the probability that an imprecise test’s performance estimate falls short of the pass threshold, an assessee may perform above the threshold (and fear failure because of negative errors) or below it (and hope to pass because of positive errors). This paper characterizes in general and in a parameterized model how that choice depends on the test’s precision and threshold, which the assessor may choose to elicit high performance, and on other features of the assessee’s problem, which the assessor must take as given and may not know exactly. When it is costly for the assessor to increase precision and assessees are heterogeneous it is optimal for some to fear failing, for others to hope to pass. This is empirically true in the results of exams that conform to the model's assumptions. The model is also applicable to editorial and research funding processes.
Keywords: moral hazard; principal-agent; exam results (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D80 I23 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2024
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)
Downloads: (external link)
https://www.cesifo.org/DocDL/cesifo1_wp11055.pdf (application/pdf)
Related works:
Working Paper: Performance in Pass-Fail Assessments (2024) 
Working Paper: Performance in Pass-Fail Assessments (2024) 
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:ces:ceswps:_11055
Access Statistics for this paper
More papers in CESifo Working Paper Series from CESifo Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Klaus Wohlrabe ().