Screening with Disadvantaged Agents

Hedyeh Beyhaghi*, Modibo K. Camara, Jason Hartline, Aleck Johnsen*, Sheng Long

*Corresponding author for this work

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingConference contribution

Abstract

Motivated by school admissions, this paper studies screening in a population with both advantaged and disadvantaged agents. A school is interested in admitting the most skilled students, but relies on imperfect test scores that reflect both skill and effort. Students are limited by a budget on effort, with disadvantaged students having tighter budgets. This raises a challenge for the principal: among agents with similar test scores, it is difficult to distinguish between students with high skills and students with large budgets. Our main result is an optimal stochastic mechanism that maximizes the gains achieved from admitting “high-skill” students minus the costs incurred from admitting “low-skill” students when considering two skill types and n budget types. Our mechanism makes it possible to give higher probability of admission to a high-skill student than to a low-skill, even when the low-skill student can potentially get higher test-score due to a higher budget. Further, we extend our admission problem to a setting in which students uniformly receive an exogenous subsidy to increase their budget for effort. This extension can only help the school's admission objective and we show that the optimal mechanism with exogenous subsidies has the same characterization as optimal mechanisms for the original problem.

Original languageEnglish (US)
Title of host publication4th Symposium on Foundations of Responsible Computing, FORC 2023
EditorsKunal Talwar
PublisherSchloss Dagstuhl- Leibniz-Zentrum fur Informatik GmbH, Dagstuhl Publishing
ISBN (Electronic)9783959772723
DOIs
StatePublished - Jun 1 2023
Event4th Symposium on Foundations of Responsible Computing, FORC 2023 - Stanford, United States
Duration: Jun 7 2023Jun 9 2023

Publication series

NameLeibniz International Proceedings in Informatics, LIPIcs
Volume256
ISSN (Print)1868-8969

Conference

Conference4th Symposium on Foundations of Responsible Computing, FORC 2023
Country/TerritoryUnited States
CityStanford
Period6/7/236/9/23

Funding

Funding Jason Hartline: Supported in part by NSF CCF 1934931. Sheng Long: Supported in part by NSF CCF 1934931.

Keywords

  • budgeted mechanism design
  • effort-incentives
  • fairness
  • school admission
  • screening
  • strategic classification
  • subsidies

ASJC Scopus subject areas

  • Software

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