Market Design With Distributional Objectives

Abstract

We provide optimal solutions to an institution that has distributional objectives when choosing from a set of applications based on merit (or priority). 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 level of the distributional objective. We study the desirable properties of choice rules in this family and use them to find all subsets of applications on the Pareto frontier of the distributional objective and merit. In addition, we provide two novel characterizations of matroids.

Joint work with FUHITO KOJIMA, M. BUMIN YENMEZ, AND KOJI YOKOTE.

Biography

Isa joined the Economics Discipline Group in 2017. He received his PhD in Economics from Penn State University in 2007. He joined Carnegie Mellon University as an Assistant Professor of Economics in 2007 and became an Associate Professor of Economics in 2013. He joined the University of Technology Sydney as Professor of Economics and Director of the Centre for Policy and Market Design in 2017. Isa has held associate editorship positions in the Review of Economic Design, Games, and Mathematical Social Sciences. Isa has received a number of grants from the National Science Foundation, Google Research, and Food Agility CRC.