科学研究

Wooyoung Lim is an Associate Professor of Economics in the School of Business and Management, The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology. He received his PhD from University of Pittsburgh. Wooyoung’s research interests are game theory and behavioral and experimental economics. He has been writing several articles in game theory and experimental economics about strategic information transmission, rationality and bounded-rationality, bargaining, market and mechanism design, etc.

We propose an admission game framework in which a hierarchical structure among colleges emerges endogenously as an equilibrium phenomenon. The model begins with two colleges positioned at the corners of a unit interval. A given set of students, each characterized by their horizontal location within the unit interval and exam score, independently decides which college to apply to. A student's utility is determined by the average quality of peers within the admitted college as well as by travel costs. Each college aims to maximize the average quality of the students they admit, subject to a capacity constraint. When students value the quality of their peers, they are incentivized to apply to colleges that predominantly admit high-quality students. This dynamic encourages some colleges to adopt more selective admission practices to attract high-quality applicants, while others may choose to forgo such prestige. Consequently, a college hierarchy emerges as students coordinate their applications and colleges respond strategically. We bring this admission game into the laboratory, providing clear evidence of the emergence of college hierarchy in experimental settings. Furthermore, we compare three policy instruments aimed at reversing the established rankings: College-based scholarships, Merit-based scholarships, and Merit-based multi-period scholarships. Our laboratory data indicate that a larger budget for the policymaker enhances the effectiveness of each instrument. Among policies with the same budget, Merit-based scholarships outperform College-based scholarships, and one-shot Merit-based scholarships prove to be more effective than their multi-period counterparts.