Related papers: Meritocracy and Its Discontents: Long-run Effects …
We study group fairness in the context of feedback loops induced by meritocratic selection into programs that themselves confer additional advantage, like college admissions. We introduce a stylized, yet novel inter-generational model for…
The matching literature often recommends market centralization under the assumption that agents know their own preferences and that their preferences are fixed. We find counterevidence to this assumption in a quasi-experiment. In Germany's…
Each year, selective American colleges sort through tens of thousands of applications to identify a first-year class that displays both academic merit and diversity. In the 2023-2024 admissions cycle, these colleges faced unprecedented…
Elites disproportionately influence policymaking, yet little is known about their fairness and efficiency preferences -- key determinants of support for redistributive policies. We investigate these preferences in an incentivized lab…
We study how school choice mechanisms shape wealth segregation in the long term by endogenizing residential choice. Families buy houses in school zones that determine admission priority, experience shocks to school preferences, and…
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 study stable allocations in college admissions markets where students can attend the same college under different financial terms. The deferred acceptance algorithm identifies a stable allocation where funding is allocated based on…
We examine the effects of an affirmative action policy at an elite Brazilian university that reserved 45 percent of admission slots for Black and low-income students. We find that marginally-admitted students who enrolled through 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…
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…
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…
We study the role of correlation in matching markets, where multiple decision-makers simultaneously face selection problems from the same pool of candidates. We propose a model in which a candidate's priority scores across different…
Equal opportunity is central to the concept of meritocracy. Opportunity and leadership should go to the people most qualified by performance, and not on the basis of arbitrary or irrelevant attributes. This principle is arguably most…
Recently, many matching systems around the world have been reformed. These reforms responded to objections that the matching mechanisms in use were unfair and manipulable. Surprisingly, the mechanisms remained unfair even after the reforms:…
Typically, merit is defined with respect to some intrinsic measure of worth. We instead consider a setting where an individual's worth is \emph{relative}: when a Decision Maker (DM) selects a set of individuals from a population to maximise…
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…
Recently dozens of school districts and college admissions systems around the world have reformed their admission rules. As a main motivation for these reforms the policymakers cited strategic flaws of the rules: students had strong…
In the name of meritocracy, modern economies devote increasing amounts of resources to quantifying and ranking the performance of individuals and organisations. Rankings send out powerful signals, which lead to identify the actions of top…
We study the problem of fair cohort selection from an unknown population, with a focus on university admissions. We start with the one-shot setting, where the admission policy must be fixed in advance and remain transparent, before…
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…