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Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons

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Education

2005

Yale University

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Full-Text Articles in Social and Behavioral Sciences

Grading In Games Of Status: Marking Exams And Setting Wages, Pradeep Dubey, John Geanakoplos Dec 2005

Grading In Games Of Status: Marking Exams And Setting Wages, Pradeep Dubey, John Geanakoplos

Cowles Foundation Discussion Papers

We introduce grading into games of status. Each player chooses effort, producing a stochastic output or score. Utilities depend on the ranking of all the scores. By clustering scores into grades, the ranking is coarsened, and the incentives to work are changed. We first apply games of status to grading exams. Our main conclusion is that if students care primarily about their status (relative rank) in class, they are often best motivated to work not by revealing their exact numerical exam scores (100,99,…,1), but instead by clumping them into coarse categories ( A,B,C ). When student abilities are disparate, the …


Grading In Games Of Status: Marking Exams And Setting Wages, Pradeep Dubey, John Geanakoplos Dec 2005

Grading In Games Of Status: Marking Exams And Setting Wages, Pradeep Dubey, John Geanakoplos

Cowles Foundation Discussion Papers

We introduce grading into games of status. Each player chooses effort, producing a stochastic output or score. Utilities depend on the ranking of all the scores. By clustering scores into grades, the ranking is coarsened, and the incentives to work are changed. We first apply games of status to grading exams. Our main conclusion is that if students care primarily about their status (relative rank) in class, they are often best motivated to work not by revealing their exact numerical exam scores (100,99,…,1), but instead by clumping them into coarse categories ( A,B,C ). When student abilities are disparate, the …