College Admissions as Non-Price Competition: The Case of South Korea

Chris Avery and Soo Lee and I have a new NBER working paper:

College Admissions as Non-Price Competition: The Case of South Korea

Christopher Avery, Alvin E. Roth, Soohyung Lee

NBER Working Paper No. 20774
Issued in December 2014
NBER Program(s):   ED 

This paper examines non-price competition among colleges to attract highly qualified students, exploiting the South Korean setting where the national government sets rules governing applications. We identify some basic facts about the behavior of colleges before and after a 1994 policy change that changed the timing of the national college entrance exam and introduced early admissions, and propose a game-theoretic model that matches those facts. When applications reveal information about students that is of common interest to all colleges, lower-ranked colleges can gain in competition with higher-ranked colleges by limiting the number of possible applications.

This paper is available as PDF (474 K) or via email.

A data appendix is available at http://www.nber.org/data-appendix/w20774