Ranking Publications : To Manipulate or Not to Manipulate ∗
نویسندگان
چکیده
We develop a multi-period theoretical model to characterize the relationship between a publication that ranks universities and prospective attendees – high school students – who might view the ranking and use it to help decide which university to attend. We assert that published rankings not only offer information about the objective quality of universities, but also have an effect on the prestige of universities, which is an element in students’ utility functions beyond objective quality elements. We show that a prestige effect can incent publications to take actions that are not in the best interest of the students; an example would be the excessive changes to ranking methodology that U.S. News & World Report (USNWR) is usually accused of. We show that if a ranking that uses an attribute-and-aggregate ranking methodology (the ranking methodology publications like USNWR and BusinessWeek use) creates prestige, then the publication (a) optimally chooses attribute score weights that do not match student preferences and (b) changes these attribute score weights over time even if there are no changes in student preferences. If a prestige effect is not present, then, according to our model, the publication optimally chooses attribute score weights that match student preferences. We use our model to characterize a socially-optimal ranking methodology – one that maximizes the sum of the publisher’s profit, the utilities of students who view the ranking, and the utilities of the students who do not view the ranking – and show that the socially-optimal ranking methodology evolves over time toward a stable ranking that diverges from the publisher’s optimal ranking. We conclude by discussing how students should deal with published rankings in the current environment, and what types of ranking methodologies might be developed to better represent student preferences.
منابع مشابه
Effect of different poly (ethylene terephethalate) hydrolysis to manipulate proper nano-surface structures for fabricating ultra hydrophobic substrate
متن کامل
Episodic Memory Bias in People with and without General Health
Introduction: Health investigations require a wide and continuous range of studies over physical and moral aspects of humans. Health is feeding good and not being sick. Many factors affect the sustainability of health; one of the important factors is cognitive (memory) factors since episodic memory plays on important role in recording a person’s personal experience related to time and place. M...
متن کاملThe roles of EPIYA sequence to perturb the cellular signaling pathways and cancer risk
Abstract It was shown that several pathogenic bacterial effector proteins contain the Glu-Pro-Ile-Tyr-Ala (EPIYA) or a similar sequence. These bacterial EPIYA effectors are delivered into host cell via type III or IV secretion system, where they undergo tyrosine phosphorylation at the EPIYA sequences, which triggers interaction with multiple host cell SH2 domain-containing proteins and thereby...
متن کاملThe Influence of Corporate Governance in Chinese Companies on Discretionary Accruals and Real Earnings Management
This study investigates the influence of ownership structure and board characteristics on discretionary accruals and real earnings management using the data of A-shares in Chinese Shanghai and Shenzhen Stock Exchange Securities Market from 2002 to 2012. The empirical results show that institutions with high shareholding proportion or great shareholding concentration give managers incentives to ...
متن کاملRanking from Pairwise Comparisons in the Belief Functions Framework
The problem of deriving a binary relation over alternatives based on paired comparisons is studied. The problem is tackled in the framework of belief functions, which is well-suited to model and manipulate partial and uncertain information. Starting from the work of Tritchler and Lockwood [8], the paper proposes a general model of mass allocation and combination, and shows how to practically de...
متن کامل