Wang, Ao; Wang, Shaoda; Ye, Xiaoyang - National Bureau of Economic Research - 2025
admissions system where students submit brief preference lists. Although option value should encourage riskier top choices, many … students are overly cautious and fail to include safer lower-ranked options. We argue that directed cognition--making myopic …-based prediction shows that about 50% of applicants exhibit this pattern, especially among disadvantaged students. Counterfactual …