Behavioral Heuristics of Chinese Education insight into the worlds largest education market through behavioral economics

Abstract

Reflections upon the acuteness of human intuitive decisions have spurred explorations of interest in behavioral heuristics. While the field has successfully rationalized unexpected outcomes in dissonance against the standard expected utility framework, the path to which its seeming intangibilities make utilitarian contributions toward behaviors and interactions within economies is still yet to be endeavored. Such studies received particularly little attention in China, where awareness of systematic behavioral biases remains limited to the majority of the public, hindering the efficiency of the countrys efforts toward economic development. This dissertation reviews the education system of China, an imperative mechanism, yielding millions whose capabilities and propensities define the prosperity of the world ahead. Through personal experience, a hypothesis was formed around hyperbolic preferences, cognitive dissonance, and the decoy effect. Combining the rigors of survey and the humanistic nature of ethnography, primary research was conducted with students from a district key high school in Shanghai. Results evidently showed students tendencies to overvalue one-dimensional test scores while overlooking the potential for un-materialized skills, as well as their nonperformance of creative or critical abilities. Meanwhile, the uprise of international options (AP, IB, A-level, etc.) induced even higher levels of dependence on local education amongst non-international students, as a result of asymmetric information, deepening their oblivion to potential misjudgments due to cognitive bias.