Cramming and Credibility: Strategic Test Announcements in the Classroom

Abstract

This paper studies a cheap-talk model of strategic test announcements. A teacher observes the day of the test of the next week decided by the nature and makes an announcement to his students who choose effort levels of studying. The competing forces are the teacher's value on consistent study habits and the students' grade orientation. We characterize the pure strategy Nash equilibrium under the linear-quadratic student utility. We also study what happens when the teacher can commit to an information policy.