Authors: Isa Hafalir, Fuhito Kojima, M. Bumin Yenmez, Koji Yokote
Date of publication: October 2022
Working paper number: 04
Abstract:
We provide optimal solutions to an institution that has dual goals of diversity and meritocracy when choosing from a set of applications. For example, in college admissions, administrators may want to admit a diverse class in addition to choosing students with the highest qualifications. We provide a family of choice rules that maximize merit subject to attaining a diversity level. We study the desirable properties of choice rules in this family and use them to find all subsets of applications on the diversity-merit Pareto frontier. In addition, we provide two novel characterizations of matroids.
Keywords: Diversity, meritocracy, college admissions, matroids, ordinal concavity