Affirmative actions: The Boston mechanism case

Afacan, Mustafa Oğuz; Salman, Umutcan

doi:10.1016/j.econlet.2016.02.014

Cited by 14 publications

(2 citation statements)

References 4 publications

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“…Since then, there has been an abundance of literature, studying and proposing solutions for the efficiency loss due to affirmative action, such as Afacan and Salman (2016), Dogan (2016), Echenique and Yenmez (2015), Ehlers et al (2014), Fragiadakis and Troyan (2017), Jiao and Shen (2021), Kominers and Sönmez (2016), Nguyen and Vohra (2019).…”

Section: Related Literaturementioning

confidence: 99%

Discovering Opportunities in New York City's Discovery Program: an Analysis of Affirmative Action Mechanisms

Faenza¹,

Gupta²,

Zhang³

2022

Preprint

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Discovery program (DISC) is an affirmative action policy used by the New York City Department of Education (NYC DOE) to increase the number of admissions for disadvantaged students at specialized high schools.For instance, in the 2016-2017 academic year, this program resulted in about 1, 350 more disadvantaged students being admitted, almost tripling the number of disadvantaged students prior to the introduction of the program. However, our empirical analysis of the student-school matches from the 12 recent academic years (2005-06 to 2016-17) shows that about 950 in-group blocking pairs were created each year amongst disadvantaged group of students, impacting about 650 disadvantaged students every year. Moreover, we find that this program usually benefits lower-performing disadvantaged students more than top-performing disadvantaged students (in terms of the ranking of their assigned schools), thus unintentionally creating an incentive to under-perform.In this work, we explore two affirmative action policies that can be used to minimally modify and improve the discovery program: the minority reserve (MR) and the joint-seat allocation (JSA) mechanism. Theoretically, by employing choice functions, we show that (i) both MR and JSA result in no in-group blocking pairs, and (ii) JSA is weakly group strategy-proof, ensures that at least one disadvantaged is not worse off, and when reservation quotas are carefully chosen then no disadvantaged student is worse-off. We show that each of these properties is not satisfied by DISC. In the general setting, we show that there is no clear winner in terms of the matchings provided by DISC, JSA and MR, from the perspective of disadvantaged students. We however characterize a condition for markets, that we term high competitiveness, where JSA dominates MR for disadvantaged students. This condition is verified, in particular, in certain markets when there is a higher demand for seats than supply, and the performances of disadvantaged students are significantly lower than that of advantaged students. Data from NYC DOE satisfy the high competitiveness condition, and for this dataset our empirical results corroborate our theoretical predictions, showing the superiority of JSA. We believe that the discovery program, and more generally affirmative action mechanisms, can be changed for the better by implementing the JSA mechanism, leading to incentives for the top-performing disadvantaged students while providing many benefits of the affirmative action program.

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Section: Related Literaturementioning

confidence: 99%

Discovering Opportunities in New York City's Discovery Program: an Analysis of Affirmative Action Mechanisms

Faenza¹,

Gupta²,

Zhang³

2022

Preprint

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show abstract

“…6 We provide the definitions of these mechanisms in Appendix A. 7 Afacan and Salman (2016) show that Boston (BM) satisfies weak responsiveness to affirmative action policy. 8 For instance, sDA mechanism which uses a fixed priority order independent of the actual priorities satisfies all these properties.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Responsiveness to priority‐based affirmative action policy in school choice

Dur

Xie

2022

J Public Economic Theory

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We consider the priority-based affirmative action policy in school choice. We weaken the responsiveness to affirmative action policy by requiring at least one minority student to be weakly better off when their priorities are improved. We find that under both the student-proposing deferred acceptance mechanism and the top trading cycles mechanism at least one minority student becomes weakly better off when their priorities are improved. We also strengthen the responsiveness to affirmative action policy by requiring all minority students to be weakly better off when their priorities are improved. We call this property strict responsiveness to affirmative action policy. We find that there is no nonwasteful, individually rational, mutually best, and strategy-proof mechanism that is strictly responsive to affirmative action policy. We then find a sufficient condition for the affirmative action policy to satisfy for the student-proposing deferred acceptance mechanism to be strictly responsive to affirmative action policy by setting restrictions on the priority improvements made by the policy.

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Financial aid in college admissions: need-based versus merit-based

Heo

2022

Soc Choice Welf

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Affirmative actions: The Boston mechanism case

Cited by 14 publications

References 4 publications

Discovering Opportunities in New York City's Discovery Program: an Analysis of Affirmative Action Mechanisms

Discovering Opportunities in New York City's Discovery Program: an Analysis of Affirmative Action Mechanisms

Responsiveness to priority‐based affirmative action policy in school choice

Financial aid in college admissions: need-based versus merit-based

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