Abstract
When participating in school choice, students often spend substantial effort acquiring information about schools. Our study investigates how two popular mechanisms incentivize students' information acquisition in the laboratory. While students' willingness to pay for information is significantly greater under the Boston Immediate than the Deferred Acceptance mechanism, most students over-invest in information acquisition, especially when they are more curious and when they believe that others invest more. Our counterfactual analyses show that providing information on both a student's own and others' preferences is welfare-enhancing. Furthermore, students who never invest in information acquisition benefit equally from information provision.