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<li><p>In the college business, reputations have a self-fulfilling aspect. If prospective students believe a school is excellent, it will attract excellent students, and this itself will contribute to making the school excellent. A college wishing to develop or maintain an excellent reputation needs to first and foremost work on the fundamentals like attracting outstanding faculty, etc. But it also helps to manage the expectations game in its favor. It needs to promote its excellence to outstanding high school seniors who then come and add to the school’s excellence. (As aside, this positive feedback loop also works in attracting excellent faculty.)</p></li>
<li><p>In promoting a reputation, it is helpful for a college to have a brand, a single name that all recognize. Let me illustrate with an extreme example. Suppose school x is sometimes called xprime. Suppose an outstanding high school student talks to four people and gets the following four messages: (1) “Go to x.” (2) “Go to y.” (3) “Go to xprime.” (4) “Go to y.” If the student does not know that x and xprime are the same (and if the student has no other info to go on), the student will go to y because there are two votes in its favor. You might think, “If this student can’t figure out that x and xprime are the same, then he can’t be that smart.” But even it this student is fairly certain that x and xprime are the same, it is not worth checking out because at best it is a tie, 2 votes for each school. With even a little uncertainty, the best strategy is to go to y. </p></li>
<li><p>OK, this brand dilution issue is probably small potatoes. It can’t be that big of a deal or Penn would have switched the domain name. Still, the point should be made in this thread that an individual’s choice of language potentially has practical impacts. In economist’s terms there is an external effect. Some of the writers in this thread argue that they should be free to call things whatever they want in they same way they should be free to pick whatever they want to eat for dinner. I don’t care what others eat, but I do care what words they use. It is a good thing, for example, that we coordinate and use one primary language for classes at college. It is also good to coordinate on the nickname of the school.</p></li>
<li><p>The University of Deleware, which started this problem by choosing the udel.edu domain name, seems to have escaped this controversy. No one seems to want to call it UDel.</p></li>
<li><p>When I was at Penn, some entrepreneurial student made some money selling “Not Penn State” t-shirts. Looks like there might be an opportunity to sell “Not UPenn” shirts!</p></li>
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