相关论文: In Search of Excellence and Equity in Physics
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…
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…
The largely dominant meritocratic paradigm of highly competitive Western cultures is rooted on the belief that success is due mainly, if not exclusively, to personal qualities such as talent, intelligence, skills, efforts or risk taking.…
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…
In many countries and at European level, research policy increasingly focuses on 'excellent' researchers. The concept of excellence however is complex and multidimensional. For individual scholars it involves talents for innovative…
Humanity has been fascinated by the pursuit of fortune since time immemorial, and many successful outcomes benefit from strokes of luck. But success is subject to complexity, uncertainty, and change - and at times becoming increasingly…
Opportunities, such as access to education or family background, shape income inequality by influencing the chances of economic success. Unequal opportunities create uncertainty about whether success is merit- or luck-based. We examine how…
In recent paper "Quantifying Inequities and Documenting Elitism in PhD-granting Mathematical Sciences Departments in the United States" (arXiv:2308.13750) by a group of accomplished and/or aspiring mathematicians, the authors use data to…
What happens if selective colleges change their admission policies? We study this question by analyzing the world's first implementation of nationally centralized meritocratic admissions in the early twentieth century. We find a persistent…
Participants in socio-economic systems are often ranked based on their performance. Rankings conveniently reduce the complexity of such systems to ordered lists. Yet, it has been shown in many contexts that those who reach the top are not…
It is widely agreed that exams must be fair; yet what this exactly means is not made clear. One may mean fairness of treatment, but this merely propagates the fairness or unfairness of pre-existing rules. Fairness of opportunity on the…
Fairness has emerged as an important consideration in algorithmic decision-making. Unfairness occurs when an agent with higher merit obtains a worse outcome than an agent with lower merit. Our central point is that a primary cause of…
Winner selection by majority, in an election between two candidates, is the only rule compatible with democratic principles. Instead, when the candidates are three or more and the voters rank candidates in order of preference, there are no…
Shortlisting is the process of selecting a subset of alternatives from a larger pool for further consideration or final decision-making. It is widely applied in social choice and multi-agent system scenarios. The growing demand for…
As the diversity of people in higher education grows, Universities are struggling to provide inclusive environments that nurture the spirit of free inquiry in the presence of these differences. At the extreme, the value of diversity is…
Conflict in research teams was a near-ubiquitous phenomenon, with the three top issues being lack of respect or overconfidence, non-collegial behaviour and authorship. Most frequently involved (and perceived as most helpful) were informal…
Evaluation is the central means for assessing, understanding, and communicating about NLP models. In this position paper, we argue evaluation should be more than that: it is a force for driving change, carrying a sociological and political…
The emergence and growth of research on issues of ethics in AI, and in particular algorithmic fairness, has roots in an essential observation that structural inequalities in society are reflected in the data used to train predictive models…
The selection process of proposals is a crucial component of scientific progress and innovations. Limited resources must be allocated in the most effective way to maximise advancements and the production of new knowledge, especially as it…
In many prediction problems, the predictive model affects the distribution of the prediction target. This phenomenon is known as performativity and is often caused by the behavior of individuals with vested interests in the outcome of the…