BOĞAZİÇİ ÜNİVERSİTESİ
ISS/EC-2008-05
College Admissions Game:
Early Action or Early Decision?
Ayse Mumcu
Ismail Saglam
ARAŞTIRMA RAPORU
RESEARCH PAPERS
Boğaziçi University Department of Economics Research Papers are of preliminary nature, circulated
to promote scientific discussion. They are not to be quoted without written permission of the
author(s).
College Admissions Game:
Early Action or Early Decision?∗
AyŞe Mumcu1
Department of Economics, Bogazici University
and
Ismail Saglam
Department of Economics, TOBB University of Economics and Technology
In this paper, we study the long-played, yet until now unmodeled, college ad-
missions game over early admissions plans using a many-to-one matching frame-
work. We characterize the equilibrium strategies of each college involving its early
quota out of its total capacity, and the set of admissible and deferred students
within its applicant pool independently from the early admissions plans of the
colleges in the market. Given these strategies, we show that for each college early
action is a weakly dominant choice between early admissions plans.
Keywords: Many-to-one matching, early action, early decision, college admis-
sions.
JEL Classification Numbers: C71, C78, D71.
∗The authors respectively thank, for their hospitality, the University of Pennsylvania
and M.I.T., where they visited during academic year 2006-2007. The authors would like to
gratefully acknowledge the financial support for this study by Bogazici University Research
Fund, Project No. 07HC101. The authors also thank Ozgur Yilmaz for helpful comments
and discussions. The first draft of this paper was written while the second author was
affiliated with Bogazici University. The second author acknowledges the support of Turkish
Academy of Sciences, in the framework of Distinguished Young Scientist Award Program
(TUBA-GEBIP). The usual disclaimer applies.
1Corresponding author.
Department of Economics, Bogazici University, Be-
bek, 34342 Istanbul, Turkey.
Tel:
90-212-3597