Victoria Pu

Ronald I. McKinnon Memorial Fellowship for Undergraduates | 2017 - 2018 Academic Year

Quantifying Query Costs of School-Choice Match in Gaokao Admissions: Welfare Implications of Immediate Acceptance, Deferred Acceptance, and the Chinese Parallel Method

The modern descendant of civil service examinations, gaokao, is the controversial gatekeeper to college education in China. Admitting students solely by their exam score, the gaokao system is meritocratic at best, creating equal-access opportunities. But matching nine million students vying for seven million seats is no simple feat, and traditional matching mechanisms do not consider costs of information discovery despite the scope and combinatorial complexity of such markets. Pu will analyze how “query costs” correlate with socioeconomic factors such as income. She will then model region-specific cost structures according to local demographics and explore how accounting for costs affects optimal mechanism choice.

Victoria Pu, Department of Economics

Victoria Pu is majoring in economics. She is writing her thesis on how costs of information discovery and preference querying might affect welfare of outcomes in various school-choice matching mechanisms. She has interned abroad in China and Japan.

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