M. Bumin Yenmez (Washington University in St. Louis)

M. Bumin Yenmez (Washington University in St. Louis)

Nov 11, 2024 - 3:40 PM
to Nov 11, 2024 - 5:00 PM

M. Bumin YenmezDescription: Department Seminar

Location: 368A Heady Hall

Contact Person: Bertan Turhan

Title: "Diversity in choice as majorization" (joint with Federico Echenique and Teddy Mekonnen)

Abstract: We use majorization to model comparative diversity in school choice. A population of agents is more diverse than another population of agents if its distribution over groups is less concentrated: being less concentrated takes a specific mathematical meaning borrowed from the theory of majorization. We adapt the standard notion of majorization in order to favor arbitrary distributional objectives, such as population-level distributions over race/ethnicity or socioeconomic status. With school admissions in mind, we axiomatically characterize choice rules that are consistent with modified majorization, and constitute a principled method for admitting a diverse population of students into a school. Two important advantages of our approach is that majorization provides a natural notion of diversity, and that our axioms are independent of any exogenous priority ordering. We compare our choice rule to the leading proposal in the literature, ``reserves and quotas,'' and find ours to be more flexible.