Brief Announcement: On Effective Affirmative Action in School Choice

Abstract

The purpose of affirmative action in school choice is to create a more equal and diverse social environment, i.e., granting students from disadvantaged social groups preferential treatments in school admission decisions to maintain racial, ethnic or socioeconomic balance. Recent evidences from both academia and practice, however, indicate that implementing affirmative action policies in school choice problems may induce substantial welfare loss on the purported beneficiaries (i.e., minority students). Using the minority reserve policy in the student optimal stable mechanism as an example, this paper addresses the following two questions: what are the causes of such perverse consequence, and when we can effectively implement affirmative action policies without unsatisfied outcomes.

A draft full version is available at http://ssrn.com/abstract=2617877.

Y. Liu—Financial support from the Center for research in the Foundations of Electronic Markets (CFEM), supported by the Danish Council for Strategic Research, is gratefully acknowledged.