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On the welfare effects of affirmative actions in school choice

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  • Yun Liu

    (Shandong University)

Abstract

Recent evidence, from both academia and practice, indicates that implementing affirmative action policies in school choice problems may induce substantial welfare losses on the intended beneficiaries. This paper addresses the following two questions: what are the causes of such perverse consequences, and when we can effectively implement affirmative action policies without unsatisfactory outcomes. Using the minority reserve policy in the student optimal stable mechanism as an example, I show that two acyclicity conditions, type-specific acyclicity and strongly type-specific acyclicity, are crucial for the effective implementations of minority reserve policies. I further illustrate how restrictive these two acyclicity conditions are, and the intrinsic difficulty of embedding diversity goals into stable matching mechanisms. Under some regularity conditions, I demonstrate that the minority reserve policy is very unlikely to cause welfare losses on any minority students when the number of schools is sufficiently large.

Suggested Citation

  • Yun Liu, 2017. "On the welfare effects of affirmative actions in school choice," Review of Economic Design, Springer;Society for Economic Design, vol. 21(2), pages 121-151, June.
  • Handle: RePEc:spr:reecde:v:21:y:2017:i:2:d:10.1007_s10058-017-0200-1
    DOI: 10.1007/s10058-017-0200-1
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    Cited by:

    1. Yun Liu, 2021. "On the Equivalence of Two Competing Affirmative Actions in School Choice," Papers 2112.14074, arXiv.org, revised Mar 2022.
    2. Kawagoe, Toshiji & Matsubae, Taisuke & Takizawa, Hirokazu, 2018. "The Skipping-down strategy and stability in school choice problems with affirmative action: Theory and experiment," Games and Economic Behavior, Elsevier, vol. 109(C), pages 212-239.

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    More about this item

    Keywords

    School choice; Affirmative action; Deferred acceptance; Type-specific acyclicity; Strongly type-specific acyclicity; Large market;
    All these keywords.

    JEL classification:

    • C78 - Mathematical and Quantitative Methods - - Game Theory and Bargaining Theory - - - Bargaining Theory; Matching Theory
    • D61 - Microeconomics - - Welfare Economics - - - Allocative Efficiency; Cost-Benefit Analysis
    • I20 - Health, Education, and Welfare - - Education - - - General

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