Related papers: Downstream Effects of Affirmative Action

We consider the problem of designing affirmative action policies for selecting the top-k candidates from a pool of applicants. We assume that for each candidate we have socio-demographic attributes and a series of variables that serve as…

We study how the design of admissions policies affects the ability of students admitted to universities. In our model, applicants have a multi-dimensional ability, which is a combination of a "type" and a "soft skill." Universities may…

In this paper, we study university admissions under a centralized system that uses grades and standardized test scores to match applicants to university programs. We consider affirmative action policies that seek to increase the number of…

Many U.S. colleges now use test-optional admissions. A frequent claim is that by not seeing standardized test scores, a college can admit a student body it prefers, say with more diversity. But how can observing less information improve…

We study the problem of selecting the top-k candidates from a pool of applicants, where each candidate is associated with a score indicating his/her aptitude. Depending on the specific scenario, such as job search or college admissions,…

We study a game theoretic model of standardized testing for college admissions. Students are of two types; High and Low. There is a college that would like to admit the High type students. Students take a potentially costly standardized…

We study fairness in classification, where individuals are classified, e.g., admitted to a university, and the goal is to prevent discrimination against individuals based on their membership in some group, while maintaining utility for the…

While much of the rapidly growing literature on fair decision-making focuses on metrics for one-shot decisions, recent work has raised the intriguing possibility of designing sequential decision-making to positively impact long-term social…

The study of fairness in intelligent decision systems has mostly ignored long-term influence on the underlying population. Yet fairness considerations (e.g. affirmative action) have often the implicit goal of achieving balance among groups…

We examine the possible consequences of a change in law school admissions in the United States from an affirmative action system based on race to one based on socioeconomic class. Using data from the 1991-1996 Law School Admission Council…

Due to the Covid-19 pandemic, more than 500 US-based colleges and universities went "test-optional" for admissions and promised that they would not penalize applicants for not submitting test scores, part of a longer trend to rethink the…

Discrimination in selection problems such as hiring or college admission is often explained by implicit bias from the decision maker against disadvantaged demographic groups. In this paper, we consider a model where the decision maker…

In many countries and institutions around the world, the hiring of workers is made through open competitions. In them, candidates take tests and are ranked based on scores in exams and other predetermined criteria. Those who satisfy some…

Critical decisions in hiring, college admissions, and credit lending are guided by predictions made in the presence of uncertainty. While uncertainty imparts errors across all demographic groups, this paper shows that the types of errors…

We study the problem of training a model that must obey demographic fairness conditions when the sensitive features are not available at training time -- in other words, how can we train a model to be fair by race when we don't have data…

To better understand discriminations and the effect of affirmative actions in selection problems (e.g., college admission or hiring), a recent line of research proposed a model based on differential variance. This model assumes that the…

How do socioeconomically unequal screening practices impact access to elite firms and what policies might reduce inequality? Using personnel data from elite U.S. and European multinational corporations recruiting from an elite Indian…

Over the past two decades, the notion of implicit bias has come to serve as an important component in our understanding of discrimination in activities such as hiring, promotion, and school admissions. Research on implicit bias posits that…

Motivated by school admissions, this paper studies screening in a population with both advantaged and disadvantaged agents. A school is interested in admitting the most skilled students, but relies on imperfect test scores that reflect both…

There is debate over whether Asian American students are admitted to selective colleges and universities at lower rates than white students with similar academic qualifications. However, there have been few empirical investigations of this…