IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/bla/buecrs/v71y2019i3p558-572.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

A Good Advisor

Author

Listed:
  • Nathan Berg
  • Jeong‐Yoo Kim

Abstract

Effective education requires strategic consideration. If students doubt the motives of teachers and advisors, then students rationally ignore the advice they receive. Valuable information is lost in such bad communication outcomes and, consequently, the quality of education suffers. In this paper, we argue that an advisor's sacrifice is an essential virtue of a good advisor for efficient communication between an advisor and a student. We model the relation between them as a signaling game. We find a separating equilibrium in which a good advisor (whose objective function truly coincides with the student's own objective function) makes a costly sacrifice that causes the student to believe what the advisor says, while a non‐good advisor (whose objective does not coincide with the student's) chooses not to make the costly sacrifice and, consequently, the student completely ignores the advisor. In fact, it turns out to be the unique equilibrium that survives the Intuitive Criterion. The model demonstrates the importance of making students aware of those aspects of the advisor's objectives that students may not realize are closely aligned with their own (e.g., the extent to which an advisor cares about students' academic and professional trajectories as evaluated by students themselves).

Suggested Citation

  • Nathan Berg & Jeong‐Yoo Kim, 2019. "A Good Advisor," Bulletin of Economic Research, Wiley Blackwell, vol. 71(3), pages 558-572, July.
  • Handle: RePEc:bla:buecrs:v:71:y:2019:i:3:p:558-572
    DOI: 10.1111/boer.12180
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://doi.org/10.1111/boer.12180
    Download Restriction: no

    File URL: https://libkey.io/10.1111/boer.12180?utm_source=ideas
    LibKey link: if access is restricted and if your library uses this service, LibKey will redirect you to where you can use your library subscription to access this item
    ---><---

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Nathan Berg & Yuki Watanabe, 2020. "Conservation of behavioral diversity: on nudging, paternalism-induced monoculture, and the social value of heterogeneous beliefs and behavior," Mind & Society: Cognitive Studies in Economics and Social Sciences, Springer;Fondazione Rosselli, vol. 19(1), pages 103-120, June.
    2. Pathak, Seemantini & Chiu, Shih-Chi (Sana), 2020. "Firm-advisor ties and financial performance in the context of corporate divestiture," Journal of Business Research, Elsevier, vol. 121(C), pages 315-328.
    3. Angerer, Silvia & Glätzle-Rützler, Daniela & Waibel, Christian, 2023. "Framing and subject pool effects in healthcare credence goods," Journal of Behavioral and Experimental Economics (formerly The Journal of Socio-Economics), Elsevier, vol. 103(C).

    More about this item

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:bla:buecrs:v:71:y:2019:i:3:p:558-572. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Wiley Content Delivery (email available below). General contact details of provider: http://www.blackwellpublishing.com/journal.asp?ref=0307-3378 .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.