What preferences are revealed by market designs? by Oğuzhan Çelebi (who is on the job market)

Oğuzhan Çelebi is on the job market this year (listed on the job market websites of both MIT and Stanford where he's finishing a two year postdoc). He has a new paper that takes a really novel approach to market design.  It looks at the implicit preference relation (if one exists) that a mechanism reveals when a revealed preference analysis is done of the choices it makes from different possible menus of alternatives. The specific focus is on preferences for diversity revealed by mechanisms used in connection with affirmative action.

Diversity Preferences and Affirmative Action, by Oğuzhan Çelebi 

Abstract: "In various contexts, institutions allocate resources using rules that determine selections given the set of candidates. Many of these rules feature affirmative action, accounting for both identity and (match) quality of individuals. This paper studies the relationship between these rules and the preferences underlying them. I map the standard setting of market design to the revealed preference framework, interpreting choice rules as observed choices made across different situations. I provide a condition that characterizes when a rule can be rationalized by preferences based on identities and qualities. I apply tests based on this condition to evaluate real-world mechanisms, including India’s main affirmative action policy for allocating government jobs, and find that it cannot be rationalized. When identities are multidimensional, I show that non-intersectional views of diversity can be exploited by dominant groups to increase their representation and cause the choice rules to violate the substitutes condition, a key requirement for the use of stable matching mechanisms. I also characterize rules that can be rationalized by preferences separable in diversity and quality, demonstrating that they lead to a unique selection within the broader set of policies that reserve places based on individuals’ identities."

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He's a target of opportunity for any department interested in market design.

Standardized testing returns to college admissions

 Standardized admissions exams are making a comeback:

Elite French university revives entrance exam to combat AI fears. Sciences Po reverses changes intended to make admissions more egalitarian, saying ChatGPT and private tutoring mean essays are no longer ‘objective’  by Maurício Alencar, Wednesday October 23 2024, 12.00pm BST, The Times 

"Sciences Po’s new director, Luis Vassy, said standardised testing would make admissions more “objective”, despite one of his predecessors, Frédéric Mion, dropping the exam in an attempt to make the process more accessible to poorer students who had to pay for travel into Paris to sit the test."

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Here's the story from the Harvard Gazzette (in April):

Harvard announces return to required testing. Leading researchers cite strong evidence that testing expands opportunity

"Students applying to Harvard College for fall 2025 admission will be required to submit standardized test scores, the Faculty of Arts and Sciences announced ... This new policy will be applied to the Class of 2029 admissions cycle and will be formally assessed at regular intervals. 

...

"“Standardized tests are a means for all students, regardless of their background and life experience, to provide information that is predictive of success in college and beyond,” she said. “Indeed, when students have the option of not submitting their test scores, they may choose to withhold information that, when interpreted by the admissions committee in the context of the local norms of their school, could have potentially helped their application. In short, more information, especially such strongly predictive information, is valuable for identifying talent from across the socioeconomic range.”

 

"In research published last year, Harvard Professors Raj Chetty and David J. Deming and co-author John N. Friedman used data from more than 400 institutions and about 3.5 million undergrads per year to better understand socioeconomic diversity and admissions. Standardized tests emerged as an important tool to identify promising students at less-well-resourced high schools, particularly when paired with other academic credentials.

 

“Critics correctly note that standardized tests are not an unbiased measure of students’ qualifications, as students from higher-income families often have greater access to test prep and other resources,” said Chetty, the William A. Ackman Professor of Public Economics and director of Opportunity Insights. “But the data reveal that other measures — recommendation letters, extracurriculars, essays — are even more prone to such biases. Considering standardized test scores is likely to make the admissions process at Harvard more meritocratic while increasing socioeconomic diversity."

Affirmative action in Brazilian universities: guest post by Inácio Bó

 Recent legislation in Brazil addresses university admissions with affirmative action that targets multiple characteristics that individuals may have (in different combinations), namely income, ethnicity, and the type of institution at which they studied. Early attempts to implement such a system produced undesirable outcomes, but recent legislation, informed by market design, is on the path to correcting this. Below, Inácio Bó brings us up to date:

Guest blog post by Inácio Bó

For many decades, Brazilian’s federal universities were—and still are— the top higher education institutions in the country. They had, however, a contradictory combination of circumstances: all of them were public-funded and tuition-free, but their students were overwhelmingly from a minority white higher socio-economic class. In response to that, in 2012 congress passed legislation mandating affirmative action in the access of all such institutions.

Orhan Aygün and I were at that time classmates pursuing our PhD in economics at Boston College. We spent days and weeks looking at the details of the structure of the rules for implementing the law, trying to better understand it. While working on some examples, we noticed that there could in principle be situations that were at odds with the intended objective of the law. Under some circumstances, black and low-income candidates would be rejected from positions where white and high-income candidates would be accepted, despite the former having higher entry-level exam grades than the latter. This  would be an outcome that goes in the opposite direction from the intended objective of helping black and low-income students attend these institutions.

The reason for this problem lies on the method used for implement the affirmative action law in the universities. Seats in each program in each university were split into groups of seats, including “open seats”, “black candidates”, “low-income candidates”, and “black and low-income candidates”. When applying for a program, a candidate would choose one of the alternatives for which she is eligible. The top candidates among those applying for each set of seats, ranked by their grade in a national exam, would be accepted. This method might, however, result in different levels of competition for different seats in the same program, resulting for example in tougher requirements for acceptance for “black and low-income” candidates than for “black” candidates, even if on average low-income candidates have lower grades overall.

In a paper published in the AEJ:Micro in 2021 (Aygün, Orhan, and Inácio Bó. 2021. "College Admission with Multidimensional Privileges: The Brazilian Affirmative Action Case." American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, 13 (3): 1-28.), we showed how this problem can be solved while still satisfying the text and spirit of the affirmative action law in Brazil with small changes in the way by which candidates are selected. (The idea is to order slot-specific priorities so that candidates with protected characteristics can compete for all of those slots for which their characteristics qualify them.) The paper also shows “smoking gun” evidence that these “unfair rejections” were taking place, showing that programs where the cutoff grades for acceptance for each subset of seats were compatible with these rejections constituted almost half of the programs offered across the nation.

While the article gained praise in the academic economic community, our hopes that it would reach the policymakers in Brazil were initially dashed. Despite having the chance of personally visiting the Ministry of Education in 2015 for two weeks, my attempts to talk with those in power were unsuccessful, and people to whom I explained some of our findings deemed its contents “critical of the government”.

 Especially in light of the political developments that took place in Brazil in the years that followed, I had mostly moved on from my hopes of seeing the changes we proposed being implemented.

Things started to change, however, around May of 2022. The staff from the office of representative Tábata Amaral, who is a prominent young politician with a focus on education, were having talks with Ursula Mello, now a professor at the Department of Economics at PUC-Rio in Rio de Janeiro, about some aspects of the affirmative action law related to her work. Given her knowledge about the AEJ:Micro paper, Ursula suggested that I join the discussions. A meeting where this happened even ended up in the press (https://www1.folha.uol.com.br/educacao/2022/05/pesquisadores-defendem-novo-algoritmo-no-sisu-para-nao-prejudicar-cotistas.shtml).

Adriano Senkevics, her co-author in related papers who works at the INEP—an agency connected to the Brazilian Ministry of Education in charge of evaluating educational systems—also joined.

In these discussions, it became clear that if we wanted our ideas to have any chance of gaining traction, we needed to write a policy-oriented paper, focused on the current Brazilian specifics, in Portuguese, and with policy-makers as the audience—not academics.

Adriano and I worked together in that project, now with a much more detailed dataset. We tailored the proposal to the updated law, which also included reservations for candidates with disabilities, and were finally able to quantify the negative impact of the failures we identified. Our estimates indicate that, in the selection process of 2019, at least ten thousand students were “unfairly rejected” from their applications, with more than 8 thousand being left unmatched to any university despite having an exam grade high enough to be accepted for less restrictive reserved seats. These numbers greatly exceeded our expectations, and made a clear political case for a change. The working paper went out in January of 2023 (“Proposal to change the rules for the occupation of quotas in the student entrance to federal institutions of higher education,” by Inácio Bó and Adriano Souza Senkevics).

While the theoretical arguments were already in the AEJ:Micro paper, the proposal had a greater and faster impact in the corridors of the Brazilian capital. Articles in the main newspapers in the country reported on the findings and the proposal (https://oglobo.globo.com/brasil/educacao/enem-e-vestibular/noticia/2023/03/quase-650-candidatos-para-uma-vaga-maiores-concorrencia-do-sisu-estao-entre-os-alunos-cotistas.ghtml

, https://oglobo.globo.com/brasil/antonio-gois/coluna/2023/02/reformar-o-sisu.ghtml

, https://www1.folha.uol.com.br/colunas/rodrigo-zeidan/2023/04/desenhando-mercados.shtml )

People were openly sharing the article on twitter with members of the ministry of education

(https://twitter.com/thiamparo/status/1621189953785839617?s=20 ,

https://twitter.com/mgaldino/status/1621008428763332612?s=20 ). We could feel the momentum.

In the months that followed, I started having regular interactions with members of the Ministry of Education. The text and zoom discussions involved technical and political aspects of changes in the law, which extended beyond the specific changes we suggested.

Different variations of the changes and some alternative proposals were considered. I had to run simulations while flying to deliver them before a meeting that the secretary had with the minister. I also had the incredible experience of joining a meeting at the “Casa Civil”—a department somewhat comparable to the prime minister in a parliamentary system—with the presence of secretaries from multiple ministries , where I presented our proposal and discussed some details and scenarios. Around that time, and without our knowledge, a senator presented a bill explicitly based on our proposal (https://www25.senado.leg.br/web/atividade/materias/-/materia/156995 ).

By the end of June, our belief that the changes would be implemented became stronger. Since our proposal was (by design) already compatible with the quotas law, its implementation could be done even in the absence of new legislation, and there was clear interest on the part of those in charge for making it happen.

A momentous event in this journey, however, took place on August 9th.

Because of a series of political circumstances, an urge to pass a renewed law for the affirmative action led to a bill proposed by Representative Dandara—the first member of congress who herself benefitted from the quotas law—to be brought to the floor for a vote.

Among other changes, it made the affirmative action policy permanent, changed the order in which seats are filled, and included text that should, in the following secondary legislation, include text that describes our proposal. As if emotions were not high enough, we had urgent calls to send the text of our proposal to members in the floor of congress minutes before the vote took place. And this resulted in the photo below, showing Dandara giving a speech before the vote, with a page from our paper in her hand.

The journey is not yet over. The bill must still pass the senate, and the legislation with the implementation details will follow. But I learned that these changes are made of so many steps that one has to choose one as the turning point. We believe that this is a good one.

The INEP (National Institute of Educational Studies and Research) thinks so too: (https://www.gov.br/inep/pt-br/assuntos/noticias/linha-editorial/inep-contribui-com-atualizacao-da-lei-de-cotas)

Affirmative action in India

 Here's an interesting paper by Orhan Aygün and Bertan Turhan. It comes with something of a backstory, which accounts for its quite delayed publication (delays both in initial acceptance and then in publication after acceptance*). I gather it will appear in the next issue of Management Science.

How to De-Reserve Reserves: Admissions to Technical Colleges in India by Orhan Aygün and Bertan Turhan, Management Science (forthcoming),  Published Online:11 Nov 2022 https://doi.org/10.1287/mnsc.2022.4566

Abstract: "We study the joint implementation of reservation and de-reservation policies in India that has been enforcing comprehensive affirmative action since 1950. The landmark judgment of the Supreme Court of India in 2008 mandated that whenever the OBC category (with 27% reservation) has unfilled positions, they must be reverted to general category applicants in admissions to public schools without specifying how to implement it. We disclose the drawbacks of the recently reformed allocation procedure in admissions to technical colleges and offer a solution through “de-reservation via choice rules.” We propose a novel priority design—Backward Transfers (BT) choice rule—for institutions and the deferred acceptance mechanism under these choice rules (DA-BT) for centralized clearinghouses. We show that DA-BT corrects the shortcomings of existing mechanisms. By formulating India’s legal requirements and policy goals as formal axioms, we show that the DA-BT mechanism is unique for the concurrent implementation of reservation and de-reservation policies."

*This paper spent a long time waiting to be published, because of what seems to have been a priority dispute that, after the paper was accepted for publication,  was pursued through  allegations of research misconduct. The editorial office of Management Science conducted an investigation that determined that there was no reason not to proceed with publication.

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Update: here's the citation to the published version

Orhan Aygün, Bertan Turhan (2022) How to De-Reserve Reserves: Admissions to Technical Colleges in India. Management Science 69(10):6147-6164.

https://doi.org/10.1287/mnsc.2022.4566

Affirmative action in India--a market design perspective, by Ashutosh Thakur, Orhan Aygün, Bertan Turhan, and M. Bumin Yenmez

 The policy portal Ideas for India has an e-symposium on recent developments in affirmative action in India, with an informative introduction by Parikshit Ghosh, and short papers by Ashutosh Thakur, and by Orhan Aygün, Bertan Turhan,  and M. Bumin Yenmez. It's encouraging to see that the attention to these issues by such serious market designers is getting prompt exposure to policy makers in India.

Here's the introduction (which I've copied in it's entirety, with links):

Introduction to e-Symposium: The architecture of affirmative action 12 December, 2022 by Parikshit Ghosh

The Supreme Court of India recently upheld an amendment that excluded Scheduled Castes, Scheduled Tribes and Other Backwards Classes from the Economically Weaker Section (EWS) quota, restricting it only to general category applicants. However, the specifics of how this reservation policy is executed can have important social and political implications. 

Across this week, from 12-16 December, this I4I e-Symposium brings together articles that provide a theoretical basis – using principles of market design, and search and matching theory – for more efficient implementation of reservation policies. Anchored by I4I’s Editor-in-Chief Parikshit Ghosh, the e-Symposium aims to open a discussion on the architecture of affirmative action, from the mechanisms of vertical and horizontal reservations, to ensuring efficiency in meeting diversity targets.

The authors of the Indian Constitution had the wisdom to see that our tryst with destiny will be unfulfilled if we do not confront the ghosts from our past. Even as Articles 14 and 15 pronounced equal treatment for all, Article 15(4) paved the way for reservations targetted at socially disadvantaged groups. The founders of the Indian republic understood that a newly independent nation had a historic opportunity to not only break the shackles of colonialism, but also oppression in all its forms. A narrow, ahistorical notion of meritocracy did not suit this mandate. 

Still, after more than seven decades of experience, questions swirl around our reservation policy. Who deserves protection? When should it be withdrawn? Is social disadvantage synonymous with economic deprivation? Grappling with these difficult issues requires not only input from the social sciences, but also an engagement with ethics and politics. Unlike the design of airports or the sale of spectrum, this is an area where the public interest cannot entirely be left to academics and bureaucrats. 

However, affirmative action does not involve only the setting of diversity targets – which is fundamentally an expression of democratic will – but also calls for the design of concrete institutional rules to achieve these targets with the least sacrifice of the meritocratic ideal. Should general category seats be filled before the SC/ST seats or vice versa? If an OBC candidate with disability is recruited, should it count towards fulfilling both the OBC and disability quotas, or just one of them? How exactly these finer points are settled can be profoundly consequential, as economists have learnt from several decades of research on market design (Roth 2007). 

While affirmative action targets have been well articulated by legislatures, the rules for implementing them have been left ill specified, requiring courts to step in time and again. Many landmark judgments of the Supreme Court are attempts to reduce the confusion and conflict arising from procedural ambiguity. 

Unfortunately, this design aspect of reservation policy, what I call the architecture of affirmative action, has not only received scant attention in the media and public debate, but its importance seems to go largely unrecognised. Our aim with this e-Symposium is to start that conversation. 

In Indra Sawhney vs. Union of India (1992), the Supreme Court mandated the earmarking of certain positions for caste-based categories (like SCs, STs and OBCs) – what has come to be known as vertical reservation – but left the fulfillment of diversity targets for other categories (such as persons with disabilities) more flexible – an arrangement referred to as horizontal reservation. In the opening article of this symposium, Ashutosh Thakur revisits this issue and provides a critique of vertical reservations. Among other things, it has no built-in sunset clause and requires legislatures to continuously revise quotas as disadvantaged groups economically catch up with others. 

The next two articles come from researchers who have studied how to devise efficient ways of meeting diversity goals, as well as matching two sides of a market (for example, assigning students to schools or colleges) in a sensible way. In the second article of the series (their first), Orhan Aygun, Bertan Turhan and Bumin Yenmez point out that though the five judge bench upheld restricting the Economically Weaker Section (EWS) quota to general category applicants, SC/ST/OBC candidates could still make themselves eligible for these positions by not declaring their caste identity, and explore the implications of such a loophole. 

The final article examines the process through which rank holders from the joint entrance examination (JEE) are assigned to the various Indian Institutes of Technology (IITs) and other technical colleges. The assignment must respect student merit ranks, their stated preference over institutions and programmes, and the quota requirements within each institution. In addition to that, the judgment in Ashok Kumar Thakur vs Union of India (2008) stipulates that unfilled OBC quota seats (but not SC/ST quotas) should be made available to general category applicants to reduce wastage. This is clearly a complex task.   

The system currently in place was designed by the government, in consultation with a group of computer scientists and market designers (Baswana et al. 2019). It is based on the celebrated Gale-Shapley algorithm¹ and tries to ensure that within the constraints of the diversity requirement, the allocation is fair and efficient. Many readers may be unaware that a rare confluence of legislative will, judicial oversight and technocratic finesse has designed the staircase to success so many Indians aspire to step on. Yet, as Aygun, Turhan and Yenmez point out through simple and illuminating examples, when it comes to de-reserving unfilled OBC seats, the current system has subtle flaws that can and ought to be corrected. 

After 75 years of Independence, we can take some pride in our quest for an affluent and just society, yet be vigilant about the gaps in that attempt and strive to bridge them. 

Design choices for implementing affirmative action

Ashutosh Thakur

Ashutosh Thakur explains the various ways in which affirmative action policies can be implemented, and discusses the underlying trade-offs and issues at hand...

Read More

Challenges of executing EWS reservation efficiently

Orhan Aygün, Bertan Turhan, M. Bumin Yenmez

Aygün, Turhan, and Yenmez look at the implications of reserved category members having to choose between applying for positions on the basis of their caste or income...

Read More

Improving admissions to technical colleges in India

Orhan Aygün, Bertan Turhan, M. Bumin Yenmez

Aygün, Turhan, and Yenmez examines the process through which JEE rank holders are assigned to the various IITs and other technical colleges...

Read More

Note: 

1. The Gale–Shapley algorithm is an algorithm used for finding a solution to the stable matching problem, and has been described as solving both the college admission problem and the stable marriage problem.

Further Reading 

• Baswana, S, P Chakrabarti, S Chandran, Y Kanoria and U Patange (2019), ‘Joint Seat Allocation 2018: An algorithmic perspective’, arXiv Technical Report.
• Roth, AE (2007), ‘The Art of Designing Markets’, Harvard Business Review, October.

Affirmative action at Harvard and elsewhere, by Roland Fryer

 As the Supreme Court starts to hear arguments about affirmative action in college admissions, at Harvard and the University of North Carolina, Roland Fryer, a Black professor of Economics at Harvard, shares some thoughts--including stories from his own experience--about how affirmative action might be reformed.

Affirmative action in college admissions doesn’t work — but it could, By Roland G. Fryer Jr.,  Washington Post.

"On Monday, the Supreme Court will hear oral arguments in an affirmative action case involving Harvard, where I am a professor. Many people who are concerned about racial representation at elite institutions fear that the justices will end the practice as we know it. But if they do, they could provide an opportunity to create a new, data-based system that would truly help level the playing field for disadvantaged kids.

"I was raised, in part, by my father, who was sentenced to eight years in prison when I was in my teens. 

...

"But for my college professors’ willingness to look beyond my past performance — but for affirmative action — I would not have benefited from twice-weekly 7 a.m. meetings with the economics professor who showed me how science could be used to help people. Or the statistics professor who marveled at my stories of my favorite uncle — a wino with sophisticated strategies of betting on Greyhound races — and helped me use formal models to explain his behavior. Or a spot at the American Economic Association’s summer school for minority students.

"But affirmative action is very often not targeted at individuals who, because of disadvantage, are achieving below their potential. Seventy-one percent of Harvard’s Black and Hispanic students come from wealthy backgrounds. A tiny fraction attended underperforming public high schools. First- and second-generation African immigrants, despite constituting only about 10 percent of the U.S. Black population, make up about 41 percent of all Black students in the Ivy League, and Black immigrants are wealthier and better educated than many native-born Black Americans.

...

"The Supreme Court seems poised to strike down the explicit use of race in university admissions. My hope is that it will still leave room for data-driven approaches to affirmative action that ensure real meritocracy."

Scientific honors and gender gaps

 Changing from an old equilibrium to a new one can involve some actions that may not persist once a new equilibrium is reached.  Here's a paper on the awarding of scientific honors.

Gender Gaps at the Academies by David Card, Stefano DellaVigna, Patricia Funk & Nagore Iriberri

NBER WORKING PAPER 30510  DOI 10.3386/w30510  September 2022

"Historically, a large majority of the newly elected members of the National Academy of Science (NAS) and the American Academy of Arts and Science (AAAS) were men. Within the past two decades, however, that situation has changed, and in the last 3 years women made up about 40 percent of the new members in both academies. We build lists of active scholars from publications in the top journals in three fields – Psychology, Mathematics and Economics – and develop a series of models to compare changes in the probability of selection of women as members of the NAS and AAAS from the 1960s to today, controlling for publications and citations. In the early years of our sample, women were less likely to be selected as members than men with similar records. By the 1990s, the selection process at both academies was approximately gender-neutral, conditional on publications and citations. In the past 20 years, however, a positive preference for female members has emerged and strengthened in all three fields. Currently, women are 3-15 times more likely to be selected as members of the AAAS and NAS than men with similar publication and citation records."

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That paper is a followup to their previous paper on Econometric Society Fellows, which has just come out in the current issue of Econometrica:

ECONOMETRICA: SEP 2022, VOLUME 90, ISSUE 5

Gender Differences in Peer Recognition by Economists

https://doi.org/10.3982/ECTA18027
p. 1937-1971

David Card, Stefano DellaVigna, Patricia Funk, Nagore Iriberri

We study the selection of Fellows of the Econometric Society, using a new data set of publications and citations for over 40,000 actively publishing economists since the early 1900s. Conditional on achievement, we document a large negative gap in the probability that women were selected as Fellows in the 1933–1979 period. This gap became positive (though not statistically significant) from 1980 to 2010, and in the past decade has become large and highly significant, with over a 100% increase in the probability of selection for female authors relative to males with similar publications and citations. The positive boost affects highly qualified female candidates (in the top 10% of authors) with no effect for the bottom 90%. Using nomination data for the past 30 years, we find a key proximate role for the Society's Nominating Committee in this shift. Since 2012, the Committee has had an explicit mandate to nominate highly qualified women, and its nominees enjoy above‐average election success (controlling for achievement). Looking beyond gender, we document similar shifts in the premium for geographic diversity: in the mid‐2000s, both the Fellows and the Nominating Committee became significantly more likely to nominate and elect candidates from outside the United States. Finally, we examine gender gaps in several other major awards for U.S. economists. We show that the gaps in the probability of selection of new fellows of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the National Academy of Sciences closely parallel those of the Econometric Society, with historically negative penalties for women turning to positive premiums in recent years.

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Update: here's the published version of the NBER paper, in PNAS, JANUARY 24, 2023, VOL. 120, NO. 4:

Gender gaps at the academies

David Card https://orcid.org/0000-0001-6914-6698 card@econ.berkeley.edu, Stefano DellaVigna, Patricia Funk, and Nagore Iriberri

This contribution is part of the special series of Inaugural Articles by members of the National Academy of Sciences elected in 2021. January 19, 2023 120 (4) e2212421120

https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2212421120

This Supreme Court term has many cases on repugnant transactions and controversial markets

 The newly conservative-dominated Supreme Court is ready for its second term, and has a docket full of what readers of this blog know I think of as controversial markets and repugnant transactions.  While previous court decisions have expanded individual rights on these subjects, such as abortion, the present court seems to view them not as individual rights but as States' rights.  But that may be too simple a characterization of this brand of conservative jurisprudence. We're going to learn more about that as the term plays out. (I'm personally most worried about what decisions will be made about election law, because of the effect those decisions may have on future decisions.)

Here's the NYT on the coming caseload:

As New Term Starts, Supreme Court Is Poised to Resume Rightward Push. The justices return to the bench on Monday to start a term that will include major cases on affirmative action, voting and discrimination against gay couples. Several will take on questions about race.  By Adam Liptak

"The last Supreme Court term ended with a series of judicial bombshells in June that eliminated the right to abortion, established a right to carry guns outside the home and limited efforts to address climate change. As the justices return to the bench on Monday, there are few signs that the court’s race to the right is slowing.

"The new term will feature major disputes on affirmative action, voting, religion, free speech and gay rights. And the court’s six-justice conservative supermajority seems poised to dominate the new term as it did the earlier one.

...

"Several of the biggest cases concern race, in settings as varied as education, voting and adoptions.

"They include challenges to the race-conscious admissions programs at Harvard and the University of North Carolina. As in last term’s abortion case, Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, longstanding precedents are at risk.

"The court has repeatedly upheld affirmative-action programs meant to ensure educational diversity at colleges and universities, most recently in 2016. In an interview that year, Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg said the issue had been permanently settled.

...

"Mr. Trump went on to name three members of the Supreme Court, including Justice Amy Coney Barrett, who succeeded Justice Ginsburg after her death in 2020.

"Those changes put more than 40 years of affirmative action precedents at risk, including Grutter v. Bollinger, a 2003 decision in which the Supreme Court endorsed holistic admissions programs, saying it was permissible to consider race as one factor among many to achieve educational diversity. Writing for the majority in that case, Justice Sandra Day O’Connor said she expected that “25 years from now,” the “use of racial preferences will no longer be necessary.”

"The court seems poised to say that the time for change has arrived several years early in the two new cases, Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard, No. 20-1199, and Students for Fair Admissions v. University of North Carolina, No. 21-707. They are set to be argued on Oct. 31.

...

"A challenge to the constitutionality of the Indian Child Welfare Act of 1978, which makes it hard for non-Native Americans to adopt Native children, may also turn on whether the court views those safeguards as based on race, making them vulnerable to constitutional review. The law at issue in the case, Haaland v. Brackeen, No. 21-376, was a response to a history of children being removed from their tribes and heritage; arguments will be heard on Nov. 9.

*******

I think the two university affirmative action cases are no longer as closely linked as they were before the appointment by President Biden of Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, who has two degrees from Harvard, and may have to recuse herself. See this cryptic note from the Supreme Court's website: 20-1199 STUDENTS FOR FAIR ADMISSIONS V. PRESIDENT AND FELLOWS OF HARVARD COLLEGE

*********

Earlier:

Wednesday, June 8, 2022

What might the assisted reproduction gray market look like, post Roe?

Tuesday, June 11, 2019

Adoption is complex even when it doesn't include State and Tribal rights...

Medical triage for Covid-19: if/when it comes to that, how should it be organized?

So far I haven't heard of any actual medical triage in the U.S. in which life-saving treatment for Covid-19 is rationed.  There has been a good deal of discussion of how to avoid this, and of the short supply of masks, gowns, sedatives for intubation, and health care personnel.  Much of that discussion  has focused on reallocating scarce resources to where they are needed (from where they are not so scarce (e.g. California Ventilators En Route to New York, Other States), so that rationing of e.g. ventilators doesn't become necessary.  But if the infection curve doesn't flatten enough, triage may well be coming, at least in some places. (Here's an up to date account of a hard hit rural hospital near New Orleans that hasn't yet had to triage, but might be getting close if nearby hospitals were to stop taking transfers of patients.)  

Already in Italy there was a period (maybe still) when patients over age 70 (and later over 65) were not being given ventilators because of an actual shortage of ventilators compared to the number of patients who needed them. So it makes sense that, along with the discussion of how to prevent the need for triage, there is an ongoing discussion of how to manage it, if  there comes a time and place where there aren't enough vents to go around. (I have already heard a somewhat related discussion in the U.S. about whether patients on vents should be resuscitated--given the small chance of recovery, and the exposure of health care workers to Covid-19 during a resuscitation attempt.)

As in discussions of repugnant transactions, discussing allocation of scarce resources provokes lots of debate about who should get what, and what kind of distinctions should and should not be made. 

Here are longish excerpts from several interesting contemporary accounts:

Here's an article in the March 23 New England Journal of Medicine:

Fair Allocation of Scarce Medical Resources in the Time of Covid-19

by Ezekiel J. Emanuel, M.D., Ph.D., Govind Persad, J.D., Ph.D., Ross Upshur, M.D., Beatriz Thome, M.D., M.P.H., Ph.D., Michael Parker, Ph.D., Aaron Glickman, B.A., Cathy Zhang, B.A., Connor Boyle, B.A., Maxwell Smith, Ph.D., and James P. Phillips, M.D.

"Rationing is already here. In the United States, perhaps the earliest example was the near-immediate recognition that there were not enough high-filtration N-95 masks for health care workers, prompting contingency guidance on how to reuse masks designed for single use.2 Physicians in Italy have proposed directing crucial resources such as intensive care beds and ventilators to patients who can benefit most from treatment.3,4 Daegu, South Korea — home to most of that country’s Covid-19 cases — faced a hospital bed shortage, with some patients dying at home while awaiting admission.5 In the United Kingdom, protective gear requirements for health workers have been downgraded, causing condemnation among providers.6 The rapidly growing imbalance between supply and demand for medical resources in many countries presents an inherently normative question: How can medical resources be allocated fairly during a Covid-19 pandemic?

...

"According to the American Hospital Association, there were 5198 community hospitals and 209 federal hospitals in the United States in 2018. In the community hospitals, there were 792,417 beds, with 3532 emergency departments and 96,500 ICU beds, of which 23,000 were neonatal and 5100 pediatric, leaving just under 68,400 ICU beds of all types for the adult population.12 Other estimates of ICU bed capacity, which try to account for purported undercounting in the American Hospital Association data, show a total of 85,000 adult ICU beds of all types.13

"There are approximately 62,000 full-featured ventilators (the type needed to adequately treat the most severe complications of Covid-19) available in the United States.14 Approximately 10,000 to 20,000 more are estimated to be on call in our Strategic National Stockpile,15 and 98,000 ventilators that are not full-featured but can provide basic function in an emergency during crisis standards of care also exist.14 Supply limitations constrain the rapid production of more ventilators; manufacturers are unsure of how many they can make in the next year.16 However, in the Covid-19 pandemic, the limiting factor for ventilator use will most likely not be ventilators but healthy respiratory therapists and trained critical care staff to operate them safely over three shifts every day. In 2018, community hospitals employed about 76,000 full-time respiratory therapists,12 and there are about 512,000 critical care nurses — of which ICU nurses are a subset.17 California law requires one respiratory therapist for every four ventilated patients; thus, this number of respiratory therapists could care for a maximum of 100,000 patients daily (25,000 respiratory therapists per shift).

...

"Previous proposals for allocation of resources in pandemics and other settings of absolute scarcity, including our own prior research and analysis, converge on four fundamental values: maximizing the benefits produced by scarce resources, treating people equally, promoting and rewarding instrumental value, and giving priority to the worst off.24-29 Consensus exists that an individual person’s wealth should not determine who lives or dies.24-33 Although medical treatment in the United States outside pandemic contexts is often restricted to those able to pay, no proposal endorses ability-to-pay allocation in a pandemic.24-33

...

"These ethical values — maximizing benefits, treating equally, promoting and rewarding instrumental value, and giving priority to the worst off — yield six specific recommendations for allocating medical resources in the Covid-19 pandemic: maximize benefits; prioritize health workers; do not allocate on a first-come, first-served basis; be responsive to evidence; recognize research participation; and apply the same principles to all Covid-19 and non–Covid-19 patients."

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Here's a Washington Post story with a good summary of much of the discussion and disagreement about how different patients (and groups of patients) might be prioritized if ventilators have to be rationed:

Who gets a shot at life if hospitals run short of ventilators?

States, hospitals scramble to set guidelines that could prioritize pregnant women, health-care workers — and even some politicians

By Ariana Eunjung Cha and Laurie McGinley April 7, 2020 

"Pregnant women would get extra priority “points” in most if not all plans, U.S. hospital officials and ethicists say. This is not controversial. There also has been some discussion about whether high-ranking politicians, police and other leaders should be considered critical workers at a time when the country is facing an unprecedented threat.

...

"Catholic groups have called on hospitals to treat pregnant women as two lives instead of one. AARP, formerly the American Association of Retired Persons, has decried age cutoffs for ventilator access in some plans. Last month, the Arc, a disability rights group, filed multiple complaints with the Department of Health and Human Services objecting to plans that disadvantage those with “severe or profound mental retardation” or dementia.

...

"Bioethicist Brendan Parent, who served on a New York state task force that developed a highly regarded framework for rationing, sees hospitals and states following two paths.

"One group takes a utilitarian view of doing “the greatest good for the greatest number,” giving preference to those with the best chance of surviving the longest. Others are more focused on ensuring social justice and ensuring vulnerable groups have an equal chance.

...

"UCLA’s plan goes to great lengths to avoid possible discrimination, stating that medical teams may not consider a long list of criteria for ventilator allocation including gender, disability, race, immigration status, personal relationship with hospital staff or “VIP status” — an important reminder given the medical center’s proximity to Hollywood.

...

"In UCLA’s plan, front-line health-care workers and administrators may be given priority access to lifesaving treatment, when their return to work means more people are likely to survive the crisis. If all the allocation criteria are applied and there’s still a shortage of medical resources, then care should be allocated on the basis of a lottery, the document says.

...

"One of the most striking differences among plans is how they deal with the elderly and disabled. Some have strict age cutoffs, or explicit criteria that disadvantage those with certain conditions.

...

"Using life expectancy or remaining life years can also be problematic for those with disabilities, civil rights groups say. The typical life expectancy for a person with Down syndrome, for example, is 60 years, as compared to about 78 years for someone without the condition.

...

"Inova’s Motew said ethical principles allow for prioritizing “some individuals who provide more lifesaving opportunities if they could live” — and that this could include “government leaders.” He compared it to military medicine, in which those who are in a position to go back to help win the war are treated first."

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And here are some thoughts on what we might learn about medical triage from considerations that come up in allocating school places among different populations for whom some positions are reserved.  The idea is that different groups of patients would have places reserved for them, through the kind of political process that reserves places in schools for different demographic groups, with priorities within groups, and ordering of reservations among groups. Once those issues are settled by some political process, the problem starts to look like school choice with affirmative action, and in the model proposed by these authors (who are well acquainted with school choice), deferred acceptance algorithms emerge:

Triage Protocol Design for Ventilator Rationing in a Pandemic:
A Proposal to Integrate Multiple Ethical Values through Reserves
Parag A. Pathak, Tayfun Sonmez, M. Utku Unver, M. Bumin Yenmez
April 2020

Abstract: In the wake of the Covid-19 pandemic, the rationing of medical resources has become a critical issue. Nearly all existing triage protocols are based on a priority point system, in which an explicit formula specifies the order in which the total supply of a particular resource, such as a ventilator, is to be rationed for eligible patients. A priority point system generates the same priority ranking to ration all the units. Triage protocols in some states (e.g. Michigan) prioritize frontline health workers giving heavier weight to the ethical principle of instrumental valuation. Others (e.g. New York) do not, reasoning that if medical workers obtain high enough priority, there is a risk that they obtain all units and none remain for the general community. This debate is particularly pressing given substantial Covid-19 related health risks for frontline medical workers. In this paper, we propose that medical resources be rationed through a reserve system. In a reserve system, ventilators are placed into multiple categories. Priorities guiding allocation of units can reflect different ethical values between these categories. For example, while a reserve category for essential personnel can emphasize the reciprocity and instrumental value, a reserve category for general community can give higher weight to the values of utility and distributive justice. A reserve system provides additional flexibility over a priority point system because it does not dictate a single priority order for the allocation of all units. It offers a middle-ground approach that balances competing objectives. However, this flexibility requires careful attention to implementation, most notably the processing order of reserve categories, given that transparency is essential for triage protocol design. In this paper, we describe our mathematical model of a reserve system, characterize its potential outcomes, and examine distributional implications of particular reserve systems. We also discuss several practical considerations with triage protocol design.

And from the conclusion:

"In our formal analysis, we characterize the entire class of reservation policies that satisfy three minimal principles though implementation of the deferred-acceptance algorithm. As such, we also provide a full characterization of affirmative action policies."
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There are of course other models of triage than school choice. In transplantation, there's a shortage of both deceased and living donors, to the extent that many people who need transplants will never get them. The allocation of deceased donor organs is handled not entirely differently than generalized school choice of a particularly dynamic sort (potential recipients of a deceased donor kidney that suddenly becomes available are categorized into groups, not just by blood and tissue types which have immediate feasibility implications, but also by age and by how difficult it will be to find them a feasible match, and prioritized within groups mostly by waiting time and health status, differently for different organs).  Living donors (almost all are donating a kidney) are much less regulated, and through kidney exchange are mostly allocated through an exchange system that is fairly blind to group membership, although the statistics that are collected pay attention to people in a variety of categories.  The point of kidney exchange of course is not just to allocate scarce resources, but to make them less scarce.  That is a goal to think about whenever triage becomes necessary, or starts to look like it might.

Should NYC school choice diversify school assignments to match applicant demographics?

Some commentators are concerned that features closely correlated with race, for example, can be used in computerized algorithms that don't explicitly use race (see previous two posts here and here). But below is a proposal that sees using features correlated with race as an advantage for achieving diversity in NYC schools, with a view towards making admissions look as diverse as applications.

Here's a report from FastCompany:

How to fix segregation in NYC schools? Let students hack the algorithm
A Nobel Prize winner’s algorithm helps decide which students are placed in which New York schools. A team of students is trying to upgrade it.

"Many of the most desirable, highest-performing schools have a gross disparity between the racial breakdown of who applies versus who eventually attends those schools.

"Data acquired from the Department of Education by IntegrateNYC through a freedom of information request and provided to Fast Company bleakly demonstrates this point. For instance, while white students accounted for one quarter of students who applied in 2017 to Beacon High School, 42% of that Fall’s freshman class was white. At Eleanor Roosevelt High School, 16% of applicants that year were black, yet less than 1% of admitted students were black.

"Part of the problem is that the education children receive from kindergarten to eighth grade is not equal. Students who live in more affluent, largely white neighborhoods have better middle schools, which better prepare students for high school entrance exams. Students from wealthier families are also more likely to be able to afford private test prep for their students. But the city’s current admissions process does nothing to correct this.
...
"The solution students came up with was to create a new matchmaking algorithm that prioritizes factors highly correlated with race such as a student’s census tract, whether they receive free or reduced-price lunch, and whether English is their second language. Such an algorithm would boost disadvantaged students higher up in the matchmaking process, provided they have already passed a school’s screening process."
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In NYC, school principals have a lot of agency in determining the input of the school matching algorithm, in the form of preference lists for their schools. The city (i.e. the NYCDOE) provides guidelines for schools. So another approach to achieving more and different diversity would be to provide different guidelines and requirements for schools, that would change the inputs to the matching algorithm (the schools' rank order lists of students), rather than trying to modify the algorithm. My guess is that this would be a more effective, nuanced, and flexible approach.

Diversity isn't just about role models: Alsan, Garrick and Graziani on black male doctors and patients

Medical compliance--following the doctor's "orders,"--is a big issue in medical care, and here's an article that reports a novel field experiment suggesting that black male doctors treating black men may have more success than non-black docs.

Does Diversity Matter for Health? Experimental Evidence from Oakland
Marcella Alsan, Owen Garrick, Grant C. Graziani
NBER Working Paper No. 24787

"We study the effect of diversity in the physician workforce on the demand for preventive care among African-American men. Black men have the lowest life expectancy of any major demographic group in the U.S., and much of the disadvantage is due to chronic diseases which are amenable to primary and secondary prevention. In a field experiment in Oakland, California, we randomize black men to black or non-black male medical doctors and to incentives for one of the five offered preventives — the flu vaccine. We use a two-stage design, measuring decisions about cardiovascular screening and the flu vaccine before (ex ante) and after (ex post) meeting their assigned doctor. Black men select a similar number of preventives in the ex-ante stage, but are much more likely to select every preventive service, particularly invasive services, once meeting with a doctor who is the same race. The effects are most pronounced for men who mistrust the medical system and for those who experienced greater hassle costs associated with their visit. Subjects are more likely to talk with a black doctor about their health problems and black doctors are more likely to write additional notes about the subjects. The results are most consistent with better patient-doctor communication during the encounter rather than differential quality of doctors or discrimination. Our findings suggest black doctors could help reduce cardiovascular mortality by 16 deaths per 100,000 per year — leading to a 19% reduction in the black-white male gap in cardiovascular mortality.
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While there's no substitute for the kind of serious science reported in the paper above, below is a very believable anecdotal account in an interview published in Stat that suggests that companies seeking to solve medical problems afflicting women may have more success with venture capital firms that have women partners:

A women’s health startup tried to drum up interest for a much-needed drug. Many men didn’t get it

Helping low income students with college applications

David Leonhardt in the NY Times recently wrote about ‘A National Admissions Office’ for Low-Income Strivers, about a nonprofit company called Questbridge.

He writes that it "has quietly become one of the biggest players in elite-college admissions. Almost 300 undergraduates at Stanford this year, or 4 percent of the student body, came through QuestBridge. The share at Amherst is 11 percent, and it’s 9 percent at Pomona. At Yale, the admissions office has changed its application to make it more like QuestBridge’s."
...
"QuestBridge has figured out how to convince thousands of high-achieving, low-income students that they really can attend a top college. “It’s like a national admissions office,” said Catharine Bond Hill, the president of Vassar.
...
"College admissions officers attribute the organization’s success to the simplicity of its approach to students. It avoids mind-numbingly complex talk of financial-aid forms and formulas that scare away so many low-income families (and frustrate so many middle-income families, like my own when I was applying to college). QuestBridge instead gives students a simple message: If you get in, you can go.
...
The group’s founders, Michael and Ana Rowena McCullough, are now turning their attention to the estimated $3 billion in outside scholarships, from local Rotary Clubs, corporations and other groups, that are awarded every year to high school seniors. The McCulloughs see this money as a wasted opportunity, saying it comes too late to affect whether and where students go to college. It doesn’t help the many high-achieving, low-income strivers who don’t apply to top colleges — and often don’t graduate from any college.

“Any private scholarship given at the end of senior year is intrinsically disconnected from the college application process,” Dr. McCullough said, “and it doesn’t have to be.”

They plan to offer prizes in some cases to high school juniors, like a summer program or a free laptop, to persuade them to apply. To win the prize, the junior would need to fill out a detailed application, which could become the basis for his or her college application. The idea draws on social science research, which has shown that people often respond better to tangible, short-term incentives (a free laptop) than to complicated, longer-term ones (a college degree, which will improve your life and which you can afford). Two pilot programs started with donors — one focused on New Yorkers, one on low-income Jewish students — have had encouraging results, the McCulloughs say.
...
"It has an early application deadline, in late September, and a long application form, designed to get students to tell the story of their lives.

"Crucially, the program promises a scholarship not just for one year but for four. As Mrs. McCullough, the organization’s chief executive, said, “Unless you make that kind of promise to the students and their parents, they’re going to worry, ‘Will the schools really pay for all four years?’ ”
...
"The winners of the scholarships — which colleges pay for, as they do for much of QuestBridge’s budget — go through a matching process. They attend their first choice among any of the 35 participating colleges that admit them. Hundreds of scholarship finalists who don’t win are admitted separately to the colleges, through a more typical admissions process, often with nearly full scholarships. The students form a support network for one another, they say."
...
"As much as QuestBridge has grown, it of course remains tiny relative to the population of college-ready, low-income teenagers. Only a small slice of them will attend colleges with the resources to offer full scholarships. That’s why the larger lessons of QuestBridge are so important.

"What are they? One, the complexity of the financial-aid process is scaring students away from college. “You don’t even know what it’s talking about half the time,” Mr. Parker said of the federal form. The Obama administration has taken steps to simplify it, but a full revamping would require help from Congress.

"Two, large amounts of well-meaning scholarship money — from private sources as well as from Washington and state governments — is fairly ineffectual. It helps many students who would graduate from college regardless, rather than those with the skills to graduate who are at risk of not doing so.

"Three, not every problem created by inequality is fiendishly difficult to solve.

"Yes, many of them are, from growing gaps in health and family structure to struggling public K-12 schools. Yet some gritty teenagers, like Ms. Trickey and Mr. Slate, still figure out a way to emerge from high school with stunning résumés. They’re on track to become quintessentially American success stories — and far too many of them still end up falling short."

Pete Troyan (job market candidate) on the rural hospital problem (among other things)

Among the economists I'm engaged with on the job market this year is Pete Troyan. You should think about hiring him.  His job market paper is

Market Design under Distributional Constraints: Diversity in School Choice and Other Applications (with Daniel Fragiadakis)

Abstract:

"Distributional constraints are important in many market design settings. Prominent examples include the minimum manning requirements at each branch in military cadet matching and diversity in school choice, whereby school districts impose constraints on the demographic distribution of students at each school. Standard assignment mechanisms implemented in practice are unable to accommodate all of these constraints. This leads policymakers to resort to ad-hoc solutions that eliminate blocks of seats ex-ante (before agents submit their preferences) to ensure that all constraints are satisfied ex-post. 

We show that these solutions ignore important information contained in the submitted preferences, resulting in avoidable inefficiency. We introduce a new class of dynamic quotas mechanisms that allow the institutional quotas to dynamically adjust to the submitted preferences of the agents. We show how a wide class of mechanisms commonly used in the field can be adapted to our dynamic quotas framework. Focusing in particular on a new dynamic quotas deferred acceptance (DQDA) mechanism, we show that DQDA Pareto dominates current solutions. While it may seem that allowing the quotas to depend on the submitted preferences would compromise the strategyproofness of deferred acceptance, we show that this is not the case: as long as the order in which the quotas are adjusted is determined exogenously to the preferences, DQDA remains strategyproof. Thus, policymakers can be confident that efficiency will be improved without introducing perverse incentives. Simulations with school choice data are used to quantify the potential efficiency gains."

I'll get a chance to blog about another of his papers when I post on Dan Fragiadakis, as they have another joint paper (an experiment) that is Dan's job market paper.

Johanna Mollerstrom on Quotas and Cooperation

What are some of the complexities associated with the design of affirmative action programs?

Johanna Mollerstrom looks into the question of how different selection procedures may influence the subsequent cooperation among those selected. Her job market paper addresses this question with a simple experiment.  It was initially motivated by questions about Scandinavian affirmative action laws as they are sometimes applied to company boards of directors, with a quota for female participation: Quotas and Cooperation.

"Abstract: Selection by quotas is an important policy measure in the affirmative action tool box. However, quotas may come with unintended side effects, for example by causing uncooperative behavior in the group formed with quota-based selection rules. In the laboratory I measure the impact of a quota on group cooperation, and examine the underlying mechanisms. Two groups are created by randomly assigning participants to either an orange or a purple group. In the unrepresentative quota treatment, orange participants are chosen as members of a selected group by performance on a simple unrelated math task whereas purple participants are chosen based solely on the quota. I compare contributions in a public good game in this unrepresentative quota treatment to behavior in a control treatment, where the orange and purple participants are treated symmetrically and all members of the selected group are chosen based on performance on the unrelated math task. My results show significantly less cooperation in the quota treatment and I furthermore find that this tendency is observed in both the meritocratically chosen orange participants and the quota-advantaged purple participants, and regardless of the color of the matched player. The reduced cooperation remains even when participants are given a rationale for the unrepresentative quota, e.g., by appealing to a fairness argument. The negative effect on cooperation from the unrepresentative quota disappears when selection is done completely randomly instead of on the basis of performance."

Johanna was an elected politician in Sweden before she was twenty, and she is on the market this year; you could hire her.