Abstract:  Market design started with the famous work of Gale and Shapley (1962) and has reshaped various markets such as school choice, kidney exchange, and college admissions. More recently, distributional policies such as affirmative action have become a central focus of the literature. In this lecture, I give an overview of this literature starting with policies based on reserving seats for protected groups (Hafalir, Yenmez, and Yildirim, 2013). Such reservation systems have been implemented at the national level in Brazil, Chile, and India, and were used to allocate vaccines during the Covid-19 pandemic in the United States. The Philippines has its own tradition of affirmative action policies — including reservations for indigenous peoples, persons with disabilities, and other marginalized groups — and market design offers principled tools for evaluating, refining, and implementing such policies. I will conclude with recent advances that formalize distributional objectives through diversity functions and distributional preferences, and discuss their potential application to Philippine allocation problems.

Speaker:

M. Bumin Yenmez is a Professor of Economics at Washington University in St. Louis. He studies market design, with a focus on affirmative action and distributional policies. His research has been implemented in school assignment systems in New York City and Chile, and in state-level vaccine allocation during the Covid-19 pandemic. Before joining WUSTL, he worked at Boston College, Carnegie Mellon University, and Microsoft Research. He holds a PhD from Stanford University and a bachelor's degree from Caltech, and serves as an associate editor of the Journal of Economic Theory.  .

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