Shopping for Schools: How Do Marginal Consumers Gather Information About Schools?

The theory of the marginal consumer holds that a subset of better informed consumers can create a globally more efficient market through their purchase decisions. In the market for education created by recent school choice initiatives, these “market mavens” are essential to the successful functioning of the choice system given the empirically documented low quantity and quality of information possessed by the average consumer. Little is known, however, about the differences between how marginal consumers and average consumers of education search for information and make decisions about their children's schooling.