Responsive affirmative action in school choice

• 成果类型: Article
• 署名作者: Dogan, Battal
• 署名单位: University of Lausanne
• 刊物名称: JOURNAL OF ECONOMIC THEORY
• ISSN/ISSBN: 0022-0531
• DOI: 10.1016/j.jet.2016.04.007
• 发表日期: 2016
• 页码: 69-105
• 关键词: School choice; affirmative action; Minimal responsiveness

摘要

School choice programs aim to give students the option to choose their school. At the same time, under-represented minority students should be favored to close the opportunity gap. A common way to achieve this is to have a majority quota at each school, and to require that no school be assigned more majority students than its majority quota. An alternative way is to reserve some seats at each school for the minority students, and to require that a reserve seat at a school be assigned to a majority student only if no minority student prefers that school to her assignment. However, fair rules based on either type of affirmative action suffer from a common problem: a stronger affirmative action may not benefit any minority student and hurt some minority students. First, we show that this problem is pervasive. Then, we uncover the root of this problem: for some minority students, treating them as minority students does not benefit them, but possibly hurts other minority students. We propose a new assignment rule that treats such minority students as majority students, achieves affirmative action, and never hurts a minority student without benefiting another minority student. (C) 2016 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.