Research On The Incentive Mechanism Of Grouping By Ability Based On Tournament Game

One of the leading topics in education circles is the grouping by ability. Just as itsname implies, the original purpose of grouping by ability is to divide students intodifferent levels to study upon their talents (learning abilities) so as to giving full scopeto the talents. However, with the deepening research of education, unexpectable resultswere occasionally found under the grouping by ability policy. Up to nowadays, nounified argument was hold among scholars and corresponding normative theoreticalanalysis is still remaining blank. This paper analyzes grouping policy on the basis oftournament game from information economics. Being the setter of grouping policy,schools have its own interests to consider. Chinese middle schools raise socialreputation by promotes students’ scores in College Entrance Examination. Due to theabove analysis, reputation maximization problem for schools and utility maximizationproblem for students are the two main clues for us. In our theoretical model, we takeschool as principal while student as agent, principal provides incentive to students viadifferent mechanisms and in our model, is the choosing of groping policy. Through ourmodel analysis, we try to reveal the influence of grouping policy on students’ effort andschools’ reputation. Our theoretical analysis indicates that for the students, low-talentand high-talent students are better off under grouping by ability in comparison torandom grouping while mid-talent students are worse off. For schools, if the schoolscare about the average achievements of all students, random grouping is superior togrouping by ability while the later can maximize average efforts. However, if schoolsonly care about the best student, grouping by ability is always a better choice. In ourextension, we consider several cases such as unequal education resources, multi-levelgrouping and multi-awards. It is important to note at the same time, grouping by abilityshould not simply as a score ranking, we need to pay more attention to the demands ofthe personality development of students in order to make the best use of the mind andgiving full scope to talents.