When
April 10, 2026 | 11:00 am
–
April 10, 2026 | 12:30 pm
Where
102 Kern Building
Sofia Moroni fro Princeton University will present "College Admissions with Interdependent Values" (joint with Adam Kapor).
Abstract:
We study a college-admissions market with interdependent values and hetero-
geneous preferences on both sides. Two programs receive heterogeneous payoffs
from enrolling students and pay convex costs of enrollment. Programs receive pub-
lic information about applicants’ preferences and characteristics, as well as private
signals of applicants’ quality. We characterize equilibria when private signals and
programs’ payoffs are affiliated. In all equilibria, applicants are admitted if and only
if their private signal is above a cutoff that varies with the candidate’s public infor-
mation. Because applicants who do not prefer a program accept its offer only when
rejected by competing programs, programs who admit these applicants are subject
to a winner’s curse. When admissions standards are sufficiently high, programs set
lower admissions thresholds for applicants whom they believe are likely to prefer
them to rivals, and for applicants they prefer for idiosyncratic rather than common
reasons. When admissions standards are low, in contrast, programs may set a higher
threshold for students likely to prefer them, and will favor candidates who are also
likely to be attractive to rival programs. We provide a primitive condition that guar-
antees sufficiently high standards. We consider extensions in which programs obtain
private information about students’ preferences as well as their quality.