Affirmative Action with Overlapping Reserves

2008

We study mechanisms to construct equal-opportunity policies for resource allocation. In our model agents enjoy welfare as a function of the effort they expend, and the amount of a socially provided resource they consume. Nevertheless, agents have interdependent preferences, i.e., they not only care about their own allocation, but also about their peers' allocations. As in the standard approach to equality of opportunity, the aim is to allocate the social resource so that welfare across individuals at the same relative effort level is as equal as possible. We show how pursuing this same aim while assuming that agents have interdependent preferences might crucially alter the results.

Investigaciones económicas, 2007

We study in this paper mechanisms to construct equal-opportunity policies for resource allocation. In a model where individuals enjoy welfare as a function of the e ort they expend, and the amount of a socially provided resource they consume, the aim is to allocate the social resource so that the inequality of welfare across individuals at the same relative e ort level is minimized. In doing so, and as opposed to other existing mechanisms for the design of equal-opportunity policies, we account for the hypothetical relative deprivation among equally-deserving individuals. Besides studying these mechanisms generically, we analyze their performance in the context of the delivery of health care resources.

Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 2002

Proceedings of the 35th Annual ACM Symposium on Applied Computing

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 indicators of future performance (e.g., results on standardized tests). We further assume that we have access to historical data including the actual performance of previously selected candidates. Critically, performance information is only available for candidates who were selected under some previous selection policy. In this work we assume that due to legal requirements or voluntary commitments, an organization wants to increase the presence of people from disadvantaged socio-demographic groups among the selected candidates. Hence, we seek to design an affirmative action or positive action policy. This policy has two concurrent objectives: (i) to select candidates who, given what can be learnt from historical data, are more likely to perform well, and (ii) to select candidates in a way that increases the representation of disadvantaged socio-demographic groups. Our motivating application is the design of university admission policies to bachelor's degrees. We use a causal model as a framework to describe several families of policies (changing component weights, giving bonuses, and enacting quotas), and compare them both theoretically and through extensive experimentation on a large real-world dataset containing thousands of university applicants. Our paper is the first to place the problem of affirmative-action policy design within the framework of algorithmic fairness. Our empirical results indicate that simple policies could favor the admission of disadvantaged groups without significantly compromising on the quality of accepted candidates.

Journal of Economic Inequality, 2005

CoRR

Our motivating application is the design of university admission policies to bachelor's degrees. We use a causal model as a framework to describe several families of policies (changing component weights, giving bonuses, and enacting quotas), and compare them both theoretically and through extensive experimentation on a large real-world dataset containing thousands of university applicants. Our paper is the first to place the problem of affirmative-action policy design within the framework of algorithmic fairness. Our empirical results indicate that simple policies could favor the admission of disadvantaged groups without significantly compromising on the quality of accepted candidates.

Journal of Economic Theory, 2021

We propose a notion of fairness for allocation problems in which different agents may have different reservation utilities, stemming from different outside options, or property rights. Fairness is usually understood as the absence of envy, but this can be incompatible with reservation utilities. It is possible that Alice's envy of Bob's assignment cannot be remedied without violating Bob's participation constraint. Instead, we seek to rule out justified envy, defined as envy for which a remedy would not violate any agent's participation constraint. We show that fairness, meaning the absence of justified envy, can be achieved together with efficiency and individual rationality. We introduce a competitive equilibrium approach with price-dependent incomes obtaining the desired properties.

Journal of Social Issues, 1996

2013

Affirmative action is an issue about which there has been considerable public debate. We think, however, that it is a policy that has often been misunderstood and mischaracterized, not only by those opposed to it, but even by its defenders.' In this essay, we intend to describe these misconceptions, explain why we consider them to be misconceptions, and put forward a much stronger defense of affirmative action policies than that which is usually offered. In the first section, we examine and challenge prevalent misrepresentations of the scope of affirmative action policies -both misconceptions about the groups of people these policies are designed to benefit and about the benefits they are intended to achieve. In the second section, we address misunderstandings about the rationales for affirmative action policies and take issue with those who regard affirmative action as bestowing "preferential treatment" on its beneficiaries. We argue that affirmative action policies s...

Social Action, 2007

In this paper an attempt has been made to interrogate the myths of merit, as and when, the question of affirmative action evokes the public sphere.

2017

We examine affirmative action, class-based (CAA), as well as identity-based (IAA), in an economy with income heterogeneity and diverse identity groups. We establish that with class-based affirmative action there exists an equilibrium that is colour-blind, i.e. the poor face the same standards while being assigned to skilled jobs irrespective of their identity, as do the rich. Further, if affirmative action is identity-based, then there exists an equilibrium that has elements of patronization in that black workers of both income classes face lower standards relative to their white counterparts. Interestingly, a comparison shows that the relative preferences for the two policies are completely class-based, with all poor workers preferring CAA, whereas all rich workers prefer IAA. In fact, poor black workers prefer CAA though they benefit from affirmative action under both IAA and CAA, whereas the rich white workers prefer IAA though they are not protected under either form of affirmat...

2006

In this paper we aim to address the question of whether in a society that cares about equality both across population groups and within each population group (across skills), supplementing an optimal tax and transfer system with an affirmative action policy would enhance social welfare. JEL Classification: H2, D6

Journal of Public Economics, 2009

In this paper, we discuss a novel aspect of affirmative action policy. We examine its redistributive role, asking whether in an egalitarian society, supplementing the tax-transfer system with an affirmative action policy would enhance social welfare.

Daedalus, 2011

2020

We study the effects of affirmative action through endogenous set-asides. We propose a share auction for dual sourcing in which more intensive affirmative action strengthens the favoured provider. This has the potential to level the playing field and induce more competitive procurement overall. Our main result provides a condition under which affirmative action not only guarantees very substantial minority representation, but also reduces the buyer’s provision cost compared to a first-price auction. We also show that our main result is robust to variations of our benchmark model, including the assumptions specifying what providers know about each other, and how affirmative action programs are implemented.