How Admission Transparency Shapes Student Research and School Decisions

Choosing a school or university is as simple as ranking a few institutions and submitting an application. Students may spend hours comparing courses, attending information sessions, visiting campuses and trying to understand where they would actually thrive. A new study suggests that another piece of information can strongly influence whether they make that effort in the first place.

The study, 'Priority Transparency, Admission Chances, and Information Acquisition in School Choice,' by University of Melbourne researchers Georgy Artemov and Siqi Pan, was released as an arXiv economics preprint in August 2026. The paper examines how knowing admission priorities or admission chances changes students' willingness to learn about their own preferences before making school or college choices.

The researchers find an intriguing divide between economic theory and actual human behaviour. Their model suggests that giving students only partial information about priorities can sometimes produce better outcomes than complete transparency. In the laboratory, students performed best when they knew their exact priority, partly because transparency made a complicated decision environment easier to understand.

Why Learning About the Right School Matters

Students often begin the application process with broadly similar ideas about which institutions are desirable. Public rankings, reputation and shared perceptions of quality can push many applicants toward the same popular schools. Finding out whether another institution is personally a better fit takes work, whether that means researching courses, speaking with current students, attending open days or investigating location and academic opportunities.

The researchers model this search as costly information acquisition, as students can invest resources to learn more about their individual preferences. Once they do, some discover that a less popular school suits them better. When informed students spread across different schools instead of concentrating on the same highly ranked institution, competition for the most popular seats falls. Other applicants then have a better chance of getting those places. Information gathering therefore creates what economists call a positive externality: one student's research can indirectly benefit others.

Admission chances shape whether students believe that research is worth doing. Someone with a strong priority has a greater opportunity to act on newly discovered preferences, giving that person a stronger reason to investigate options. A student who knows that their priority is weak may decide that researching schools is not worth the time or cost.

This creates a difficult policy question. Should admission systems tell applicants exactly where they stand, provide only broad guidance, or withhold priority information until later?

Theory Says Partial Transparency Can Sometimes Work Better

To explore that question, Artemov and Pan compared three information environments. Under Unknown, students did not know their admission priority when deciding whether to acquire information. Under Known, students knew their exact position. Under Coarse, students received partial information: they knew whether they were among the top two priority positions or held the lowest position.

The theoretical model used three students competing for two schools. School A offered one seat and a guaranteed payoff of AUD 30. School B had enough places for everyone, but its value to each student could be either AUD 40 or AUD 10 with equal probability. Students could pay to discover their personal value for School B before the admission process.

Without researching School B, its expected value was AUD 25, making the guaranteed AUD 30 at School A more attractive. Learning changed the picture because some students discovered that School B was worth AUD 40 to them and would willingly choose it instead.

Priority made information more valuable: The highest-priority student had a 100% chance of accessing School A and a theoretical learning benefit of 5. When the highest-priority student learned, the second student's admission chance could rise to 50%, giving that student a learning benefit of 2.5. If both higher-priority students learned, the third student's admission chance could reach 25%, producing a benefit of 1.25.

The pattern creates a kind of domino effect: When higher-priority students research their preferences, some move away from School A, improving access for students below them and making research more valuable for those students too.

Full transparency can interrupt that process because a lower-priority student may see a weak admission chance and stop researching altogether. Partial disclosure can keep motivation alive by grouping students with different priority positions.

In the model, the two top students under coarse disclosure evaluated their information value across both possible positions rather than knowing exactly which one they occupied. Their learning benefit could reach 3.75, strong enough under certain information costs to encourage both students to research when full disclosure would encourage only the top student. Theoretically, then, more transparency was not automatically better.

Real People Benefited From Clearer Information

The researchers tested these ideas through three laboratory experiments at the University of Melbourne's Experimental Economics Laboratory. A total of 180 participants took part across nine sessions, with 63 assigned to Unknown, 63 to Known and 54 to Coarse. Sessions lasted about 90 minutes and average earnings were approximately AUD 32.60, including the participation payment.

Experiment 1 used computerised 'robots' as the other students, allowing researchers to isolate how participants responded to others' information-acquisition decisions. Experiment 2 placed participants in groups of three and required them to make decisions while considering the information costs faced by others. Experiment 3 removed the strategic interaction and directly showed participants their probability of admission to School A.

The results challenged the theoretical welfare ranking: Across the experimental conditions, full knowledge generally produced the highest student welfare, partial knowledge came next, and no knowledge performed worst- Known ≥ Coarse ≥ Unknown. Outcomes were also below theoretical payoff predictions across all treatments.

The explanation appears to be behavioural rather than purely economic: Only 19% of participants under Unknown correctly treated other students' information acquisition as a strategic complement, compared with 40% under Known and 33% under Coarse. Participants who lacked priority information had greater difficulty understanding how another student's research could improve their own admission chances.

Students tended to acquire less information than theory predicted: Curiosity mattered; about 17% of participants were willing to pay for information even when it had no practical value, and participants displaying greater curiosity generally showed a higher willingness to pay for information.

Participants still understood the basic importance of priority: Under full disclosure, willingness to pay for information was highest for the first-priority student, followed by the second and third. Under partial disclosure, students in the top-two group were willing to pay more than the lowest-priority student.

Participants made the correct school decision 93.63% of the time, with no significant differences across treatments or rounds. The harder task was interpreting probabilities and strategic consequences. Greater transparency reduced the difficulty of figuring out how other people's behaviour affected admission chances, yet participants still sometimes responded poorly to the probabilities placed in front of them.

Admission systems should not assume that publishing a lottery number, priority rank or percentage chance is enough. Information needs to arrive early enough to shape students' research, and it must be presented in a way families can actually understand and use.

The study concludes that full priority transparency can improve welfare because it simplifies the strategic environment and helps students make better information-acquisition decisions. Clear guidance and decision support remain important, since transparency without understanding can still leave applicants making choices that fall short of what the information could help them achieve.