Parents pick the wrong schools for their kids mostly because they have no clue what their kids actually like.
March 24, 2026
Original Paper
Misperceived Preferences in Joint Decisions: Evidence from a Field Experiment on Parent-Child School Choice
SSRN · 6386158
The Takeaway
Economists usually assume parents 'override' their children's wishes on purpose. This field experiment found that when parents are simply shown a clear list of their child's actual preferences, they change their applications to match the child's choices, suggesting the 'generation gap' is mostly a data-sharing problem.
From the abstract
In many joint decisions-across families, advisorships, and teams-one party often makes a choice that primarily affects another. When the outcome diverges from the beneficiary's preferences, this is often interpreted as a deliberate override. We argue this interpretation is incomplete: the decision maker may also hold inaccurate beliefs about the beneficiary's preferences, effectively reducing the weight of these preferences in the final decision more than intended. We demonstrate this in high-st