Research On The Information Acquisition And Provision Of College Admission Based On The Gale-shapley Mechanism

College application is a strategic behavior,and the formulation of the strategy is inseparable from the acquisition of information.In the process of college application,students usually spend a lot of time and energy to acquire information,such as the school's teaching quality,living environment,employment level,professional courses,and professional prospects,etc.So that students could determine their favorite school and major.However,due to the cost of information acquisition,students' information acquisition behaviors are not always successful.In fact,students and their parents often have very limited knowledge of school and professional information,which leads to errors in decision-making for the college application,even hinders students' future development.Currently,our country's college admissions mainly uses the parallel application mechanism.When the number of schools that students can apply for is not limited,the parallel application mechanism is equivalent to the Gale-Shapley student optimal mechanism.There are many researches on college admission mechanism,but previous studies most assumed that students have a certain preference for schools before applying.Few scholars have studied the college admission mechanism from the perspective of acquiring preference information.In fact,the determination of students' preference for schools is an extremely important link in the application of college.Therefore,this paper focuses on the acquisition and provision of students' preference information for schools in the process of college application.Considering students' preference for schools,it is based on the setting of information acquired by students.It aims to better guide students acquire information and provide targeted information so that improve students' matching welfare.Based on the method of game theory,this paper uses the agent-based computer simulation to model the Gale-Shapley student optimal mechanism.Research the behavior of students to acquire their preference information.The model regards college admissions as a bilateral matching process between students and schools.Students have certain preferences for schools,but this preference information requires students to acquire costly.The cost is related to the difficulty of the information acquisition environment.The model assumes that every student is a rational person,whose purpose of decision-making is to maximize their matching welfare.Students need to decide whether to acquire information and how much it will cost to acquire information.If acquiring information can improve matching welfare,then students have the willingness to acquire information.Students who have acquired preference information apply for schools with their true preferences.This paper mainly studies the willingness to acquire information,the cost of information acquisition,matching welfare and information provision,etc.,and the following work has been done:(1)Students' willingness to acquire information is based on the improvement of matching welfare.In order to study the impact of information acquisition behavior on student matching welfare,we calculated and compared students' expected welfare before and after information acquisition.It is found that when there is no cost to acquire information,as the proportion of students acquiring information increases,the expected welfare of students increases significantly.And compared with low-scoring students,high-scoring students are more willing to acquire information.Further research has found that when acquiring information is costly,students are willing to spend a certain amount of cost to acquire information.When the difficulty of acquiring information is low,it is an dominant strategy for students to successfully acquire information costly.As the difficulty of acquiring information increases,students' willingness to acquire information decreases.When the difficulty of acquiring information is higher,the dominant strategy for students is not to acquire information.And the optimal cost of students increases as the difficulty of acquiring information greater within a certain range,and decreases with the increase of the difficulty of acquiring information after exceeding this range.(2)In order to further study students' information acquisition behavior,we developed a sequential and parallel system for information acquisition and application.We used this system to complete behavioral experiments,and discussed the willingness of students to acquire information,matching welfare,and fairness of admission.It is found that when the information cost is low,compared with parallel application,students will spend more to acquire information under the sequential application mechanism.When the information cost is high,the willingness of students to acquire information under the parallel application mechanism is higher than the sequential application;and compared with the low score students,the high score students have a higher willingness to acquire information.At the same time,we compared the matching welfare under the two admission mechanisms and found that when acquiring information for free,the matching welfare of students under parallel application mechanism is higher than the sequential application.And when the cost of acquiring information is costly,there is no significant difference in matching welfare between sequential and parallel application mechanism.In terms of the fairness of the admission mechanisms,it is found that the fairness evaluation of the parallel application mechanism by students is significantly higher than the sequential application.(3)In order to study the impact of information provision on students' matching welfare and matching fairness,we set up four kinds of information environments to do comparative experiments,which are basic information environment,general preference information environment,ordinal preference information environment and specific utility information environment.In the model,we assume that the provision of information decreases the cost of acquisition information to zero,while the lack of information increases the cost of acquisition information to infinity.Providing students with corresponding information in the corresponding information environment,we find that under the Gale-Shapley mechanism,providing students with general preference information has no impact on students' matching welfare,but can improve the fairness of matching results.Providing students with ordinal preference information can improve students' matching welfare and the fairness of matching results.When students know their ordinal preference information,providing students with school specific utility information has no effect on their matching results.