Gradual matching with affirmative action

Kriti Manocha and Bertan Turhan

Games and Economic Behavior, 2025, vol. 153, issue C, 164-178

Abstract: This paper studies a multi-period college admissions problem where schools' choice rules incorporate affirmative action constraints. Students have the option to either finalize their assignments at the end of each period or participate in subsequent periods with the possibility of updating their rank-ordered lists (ROLs). We show that a gradual matching mechanism makes active students weakly better off (i.e. satisfies monotonicity) if and only if their ROL update rule meets a mild regularity condition. We introduce the notion of gradual stability adapted for multi-period matching mechanisms that account for affirmative action constraints. Furthermore, we show that the gradual stability of a gradual matching mechanism is equivalent to monotonicity in conjunction with the stability of the stage mechanism. Finally, we use our results to analyze the multi-stage mechanism currently used for engineering college admissions in India.

Keywords: Market design; Affirmative action; Gradual matching; India (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C78 D02 D47 I38 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2025
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0899825625000880
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

Related works:
Working Paper: Gradual Matching with Affirmative Action
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:eee:gamebe:v:153:y:2025:i:c:p:164-178

DOI: 10.1016/j.geb.2025.06.004

Access Statistics for this article

Games and Economic Behavior is currently edited by E. Kalai

More articles in Games and Economic Behavior from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().