College Admission with Multidimensional Privileges: The Brazilian Affirmative Action Case

Aygün, Orhan; Bó, Inácio

doi:10.2139/ssrn.3071751

Cited by 42 publications

(43 citation statements)

References 17 publications

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“…In Indian affirmative action systems, the reserve-eligible students are those from disadvantaged castes (Bagde, Epple, and Taylor 2016). Aygün and Bo (2013) have described reserves for public universities in Brazil, where the reserve-eligible are racial minorities, applicants from low income families, and applicants from public high schools. In Boston Public Schools, the reserve-eligible groups are students who live in the school's walk-zone, and thus, at times, we refer to BPS reserve slots as walk-zone seats (and refer to BPS open slots as open seats).…”

Section: Decentralized Modelmentioning

confidence: 99%

Reserve Design: Unintended Consequences and the Demise of Boston’s Walk Zones

Dur

Kominers

Pathak

et al. 2018

Journal of Political Economy

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Admissions policies often use reserves to grant certain applicants higher priority for some (but not all) available seats. Boston's school choice system, for example, reserved half of each school's seats for local neighborhood applicants while leaving the other half for open competition. This paper shows that in the presence of reserves, the effect of the precedence order (i.e., the order in which different types of seats are filled) on distributional objectives is comparable to the effect of adjusting reserve sizes. Either lowering the precedence order positions of reserve seats at a school or increasing the number of reserve seats weakly increases reserve-group assignment at that school. Using data from Boston, we show that reserve and precedence adjustments have similar quantitative effects. Our results illustrate that policies about precedence, heretofore underexplored, are inseparable from other aspects of admissions policy. Moreover, our findings explain the puzzling empirical fact that despite careful attention to the importance of neighborhood priority, Boston's implementation of its 50-50 reserve-open seat split was nearly identical to the outcome of a counterfactual system without any reserves. Transparency about these issues-in particular, how precedence unintentionally undermined the intended admissions policy-led to the elimination of Boston's walk zones.JEL: C78, D50, D61, D67, I21

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Section: Decentralized Modelmentioning

confidence: 99%

Reserve Design: Unintended Consequences and the Demise of Boston’s Walk Zones

Dur

Kominers

Pathak

et al. 2018

Journal of Political Economy

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“…The objective of our paper is to analyze by means of a laboratory experiment whether behavior is affected and better outcomes are obtained if, instead of submitting rankings to a central authority, subjects make decisions dynamically. Dynamic implementations of matching algorithms are used in college admissions in Brazil (Aygün and Bó [2]) and in Inner Mongolia (Chen and Kesten [7]), and in school choice in the Wake County Public School System (Dur et al [11]). Inspired by these markets, Chen and Pereyra [8] theoretically study a dynamic matching mechanism where at each stage students propose to a school and receive information about the tentative matching.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Static versus dynamic deferred acceptance in school choice: Theory and experiment

Klijn

Pais

Vorsatz

2019

Games and Economic Behavior

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In the context of school choice, we experimentally study how behavior and outcomes are affected when, instead of submitting rankings in the student proposing or receiving deferred acceptance (DA) mechanism, participants make decisions dynamically, going through the steps of the underlying algorithms. Our main results show that, contrary to theory, (a) in the dynamic student proposing DA mechanism, participants propose to schools respecting the order of their true preferences slightly more often than in its static version while, (b) in the dynamic student receiving DA mechanism, participants react to proposals by always respecting the order and not accepting schools in the tail of their true preferences more often than in the corresponding static version. As a consequence, for most problems we test, no significant differences exist between the two versions of the student proposing DA mechanisms in what stability and average payoffs are concerned, but the dynamic version of the student receiving DA mechanism delivers a clear improvement over its static counterpart in both dimensions. In fact, in the aggregate, the dynamic school proposing DA mechanism is the best performing mechanism.

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“…Dogan (2016) notes that in the mechanism of Hafalir et al (2013), stronger affirmative action constraints may actually harm some minority students without helping others, and proposes a modification to rectify this. Abdulkadiroglu (2005), Erdil and Kumano (2013), Aygün and Bó (2016), and Echenique and Yenmez (2015) study various generalizations of school priorities over sets of students and how they can capture certain types of diversity goals. 12 The main difference between our model and the aforementioned works is that we treat the ceilings and floors as hard constraints, i.e., constraints that must be satisfied at any feasible matching.…”

Section: Related Literaturementioning

confidence: 99%

Improving matching under hard distributional constraints

Fragiadakis

Troyan

2017

Theoretical Economics

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Distributional constraints are important in many market design settings. Prominent examples include the minimum manning requirements at each Army branch in military cadet matching and diversity considerations in school choice, whereby school districts impose constraints on the demographic distribution of students at each school. Standard assignment mechanisms implemented in practice are unable to accommodate these constraints. This leads policymakers to resort to ad hoc solutions that eliminate blocks of seats ex ante (before agents submit their preferences) to ensure that all constraints are satisfied ex post (after the mechanism is run). We show that these current solutions ignore important information contained in the submitted preferences, resulting in avoidable inefficiency. We then introduce new dynamic quotas mechanisms that result in Pareto superior allocations while at the same time respecting all distributional constraints and satisfying important fairness and incentive properties. We expect the use of our mechanisms to improve the performance of matching markets with distributional constraints in the field. We are extremely grateful to Fuhito Kojima, Muriel Niederle, and Al Roth for numerous conversations regarding this project. We would like to thank

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College Admission with Multidimensional Privileges: The Brazilian Affirmative Action Case

Cited by 42 publications

References 17 publications

Reserve Design: Unintended Consequences and the Demise of Boston’s Walk Zones

Reserve Design: Unintended Consequences and the Demise of Boston’s Walk Zones

Static versus dynamic deferred acceptance in school choice: Theory and experiment

Improving matching under hard distributional constraints

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