APL (Ajiken Power Lunch)

Thursday, the 27th of August, 11:00 a.m. to 12:15 p.m.

IDE-JETRO C22 Meeting Room

We study institutional policies assigning decisions based on a materially relevant characteristic correlated with a protected characteristic. We show that the three common anti-discrimination standards—equal outcomes, equal treatment, and meritocracy—form a trilemma: only trivial policies that treat all individuals equally satisfy all three standards, while any pair of the three standards permits non-trivial policies. We then characterize the optimal policies under each pair of the three standards. In the context of admissions where the decision is binary, these optimal policies become a two-threshold waitlist under equal treatment and meritocracy, affirmative action under equal outcomes and meritocracy, and a balanced-score rule under equal treatment and equal outcomes. Finally, we characterize the rationalizable outcomes under equal outcomes and equal treatment, and show that every atomless distribution can be rationalized as the admitted pool in the context of admissions.

Mr Tsong-Hong Tenn (Stanford University)

Miri Aoki