Speaker:Leng Ailin（Shandong University）
Time: 3:30 PM
Date: January 7, 2026 (Wednesday)
Location: Room A208,Economics and Management Building
Abstract:Educational equality is the public's most concerning and anticipated educational demand. This paper investigates the issue of opportunity fairness in educational competition using the theoretical model and real-effort experiments. Students with different economic conditions work hard to learn knowledge of various topics and invest resources to participate in the competition. The model and experiment examine how the endowment distribution, education cost, exam difficulty, and investment limit affect competition outcomes. The theoretical model predicts that when everyone's endowment is above the equilibrium investment level, players' behavior is mainly affected by the education cost and the utility loss coefficient caused by the player's exerted effort. However, experimental results indicate that even when the endowment is above the equilibrium level, differences in its distribution make people more likely to invest resources to compete. Furthermore, changing the cost of education has little impact on people's behavior, but using simple learning tasks and imposing limits can effectively curb excessive investment. Therefore, to ensure educational equality, the government can support low-income families through tax subsidies, adopt simple exam questions, and implement policies limiting high education investment; however, measures to change the education costs are ineffective.
