BUSCADOR RECOLECTA

The theoretical literature on public school choice proposes centralized mechanisms that assign children to schools on the basis of parents’ preferences and the priorities children have for different schools. The related experimental literature analyzes in detail how various mechanisms fare in terms of welfare and stability of the resulting matchings, yet often provides only aggregate statistics of the individual behavior that leads to these outcomes (i.e., the degree to which subjects tell the truth in the induced simultaneous move game). In this paper, we show that the quantal response equilibrium (QRE) adequately describes individual behavior and the resulting matching in three constrained problems for which the immediate acceptance mechanism and the student-optimal stable mechanism coincide. Specifically, the comparative statics of the logit-QRE with risk-neutral and expected-payoff-maximizing agents capture the directional changes of subject behavior and the prevalence of the different stable matchings when cardinal payoffs (i.e., relative preference intensities) are modified in the experiment., Open Access funding provided thanks to the CRUE-CSIC agreement with Springer Nature. The authors gratefully acknowledge financial support from Fundación Ramón Areces. J. Alcalde-Unzu gratefully acknowledges financial support from Ministerio de Ciencia, Innovación y Universidades (PGC2018-093542-B-I00 and PID2021-127119NB-I00). F. Klijn gratefully acknowledges financial support from AGAUR–Generalitat de Catalunya (2017-SGR-1359 and 2021-SGR-00416) and the Spanish Agencia Estatal de Investigación (AEI) through grants ECO2017-88130-P and PID2020-114251GB-I00 and the Severo Ochoa Programme for Centres of Excellence in R&D (Barcelona School of Economics CEX2019-000915-S). M. Vorsatz gratefully acknowledges financial support from Ministerio de Ciencia, Innovación y Universidades (PGC2018-096977-B-I00 and PID2021-122919NB-I00).

The popular belief that rent-control leads to an increase in the amount of affordable housing is in contradiction with ample empirical evidence and congruent theoretical explanations. It can therefore be qualified as a misconception. We present the results of a preregistered on-line experiment in which we study how to dispel this misconception using a refutational approach both in a video and in a text format. Communication in a video format comes closer to how citizens are typically exposed to information. We find that the refutational video has a significantly higher positive impact on revising the misconception than a refutational text, an effect that is driven by the departure from the misconception by individuals who initially agreed with it. The refutational text, in turn, does not have a significant impact relative to a non-refutational baseline text. Higher cognitive reflective ability positively affects the impact on beliefs of all interventions. Our research shows that visual communication effectively reduces the gap between scientific economic knowledge and the views of citizens.

We analyse individuals' preferences vaccine-distribution schemes in the World, the EU, and their country of residence that emphasise circumstances rather than outcomes or effort. We link preferences to previously-measured cognition, and find that high-cognition individuals are 35% more likely to always support such schemes. These preferences are not driven by scheme convenience nor vaccine hesitancy, but appear to be caused by prosociality. We argue that this latter is linked to the perception of less equality of opportunity in society: despite having similar ideals about the role that effort and luck should play in life, high-cognition individuals perceive outcomes to be more determined by luck.