Related papers: Affirmative Action vs. Affirmative Information

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…

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…

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 role of information and access in capacity-constrained selection problems with fairness concerns. We develop a statistical discrimination framework, where each applicant has multiple features and is potentially strategic. The…

Public and private institutions must often allocate scare resources under uncertainty. Banks, for example, extend credit to loan applicants based in part on their estimated likelihood of repaying a loan. But when the quality of information…

An agent has access to multiple information sources, each of which provides information about a different attribute of an unknown state. Information is acquired continuously -- where the agent chooses both which sources to sample from, and…

This paper studies a dynamic model of information acquisition, in which information might be secretly manipulated. A principal must choose between a safe action with known payoff and a risky action with uncertain payoff, favoring the safe…

Individual and social biases undermine the effectiveness of human advisers by inducing judgment errors which can disadvantage protected groups. In this paper, we study the influence these biases can have in the pervasive problem of fake…

We use a controlled experiment to study how information acquisition impacts candidate evaluations. We provide evaluators with group-level information on performance and the opportunity to acquire additional, individual-level performance…

Affirmative algorithms have emerged as a potential answer to algorithmic discrimination, seeking to redress past harms and rectify the source of historical injustices. We present the results of two experiments ($N$$=$$1193$) capturing…

I study costly information acquisition in a two-sided matching problem, such as matching applicants to schools. An applicant's utility is a sum of common and idiosyncratic components. The idiosyncratic component is unknown to the applicant…

In the setting where a group of agents is asked a single subjective multi-choice question (e.g. which one do you prefer? cat or dog?), we are interested in evaluating the quality of the collected feedback. However, the collected statistics…

Unaided human decision making appears to systematically violate consistency constraints imposed by normative theories; these biases in turn appear to justify the application of formal decision-analytic models. It is argued that both claims…

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…

Agents, some with a bias, decide between undertaking a risky project and a safe alternative based on information about the project's efficiency. Only a part of that information is verifiable. Unbiased agents want to undertake only efficient…

In recent studies of political decision-making, apparently anomalous behavior has been observed on the part of voters, in which negative information about a candidate strengthens, rather than weakens, a prior positive opinion about the…

We study search, evaluation, and selection of candidates of unknown quality for a position. We examine the effects of "soft" affirmative action policies increasing the relative percentage of minority candidates in the candidate pool. We…

Decades of research suggest that information exchange in groups and organizations can reliably improve judgment accuracy in tasks such as financial forecasting, market research, and medical decision-making. However, we show that improving…

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…

When information acquisition is costly but flexible, a principal may rationally acquire information that favors one group over another. The former group faces incentives to invest in becoming productive, while the latter is discouraged from…