This study explores predictors of school choice decisions in American college football recruitment. We combine data about individual athletes’ recruiting activities with social media data to predict which school the athlete will choose among those that have offered him a scholarship. While previous works have approached school choice as a rational decision process, our results indicate that a bounded rationality model incorporating social factors and heuristics may be more appropriate. We explore how the actions taken by athletes during recruitment can be interpreted as early signals of athletes’ preferences and find that models incorporating social media features consistently outperform the baseline model with only off-line recruiting features. In addition to better understanding the school choice decision, this work can help coaches to effectively allocate recruiting resources and inform social media strategies during recruitment.

中文翻译：

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在线和非现场：根据社交媒体数据预测大学橄榄球招募中的学校选择

这项研究探讨了美国大学橄榄球招生中择校决定的预测因素。我们将有关单个运动员的招募活动的数据与社交媒体数据相结合，以预测运动员将在向他提供奖学金的学校中选择哪所学校。尽管先前的工作已将学校选择作为一种理性决策过程，但我们的结果表明，结合社会因素和启发式方法的有限理性模型可能更合适。我们探索了运动员在招募期间采取的行动如何被解释为运动员偏好的早期信号，并发现结合社交媒体功能的模型始终优于仅具有离线招募功能的基线模型。除了更好地了解学校的选择决定外，