Affirmative Action in India with Hierarchical Reservations

Orhan Aygün and Bertan Turhan

ISU General Staff Papers from Iowa State University, Department of Economics

Abstract: India implements the world’s most complex affirmative action program through vertical and horizontal reservations. Although applicants can belong to at most one vertical category, they can qualify for multiple horizontal reservation categories simultaneously. We examine resource allocation problems in India, where horizontal reservations follow a hierarchical structure within a one-to-all horizontal matching framework. We introduce the hierarchical choice rule and show that it selects the most meritorious set of applicants. We thoroughly analyze the properties of the aggregate choice rule, which comprises hierarchical choice rules across all vertical categories. We show that the generalized deferred acceptance mechanism, when coupled with this aggregate choice rule, is the unique stable and strategy-proof mechanism that eliminates justified envy.

Date: 2026-02-16
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://dr.lib.iastate.edu/server/api/core/bitstre ... eb38fc3237bf/content
Our link check indicates that this URL is bad, the error code is: 403 Forbidden

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:isu:genstf:202602161614100000

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in ISU General Staff Papers from Iowa State University, Department of Economics Iowa State University, Dept. of Economics, 260 Heady Hall, Ames, IA 50011-1070. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Curtis Balmer ().