How to De-Reserve Reserves: Admissions to Technical Colleges in India
研究了印度技术学院招生中预留名额与取消预留名额政策的联合实施，指出现有分配程序的缺陷，并提出一种新的优先规则（BT选择规则）和匹配机制（DA-BT），该机制能唯一满足印度法律要求与政策目标。
We study the joint implementation of reservation and de-reservation policies in India that has been enforcing comprehensive affirmative action since 1950. The landmark judgment of the Supreme Court of India in 2008 mandated that whenever the OBC category (with 27% reservation) has unfilled positions, they must be reverted to general category applicants in admissions to public schools without specifying how to implement it. We disclose the drawbacks of the recently reformed allocation procedure in admissions to technical colleges and offer a solution through “de-reservation via choice rules.” We propose a novel priority design—Backward Transfers (BT) choice rule—for institutions and the deferred acceptance mechanism under these choice rules (DA-BT) for centralized clearinghouses. We show that DA-BT corrects the shortcomings of existing mechanisms. By formulating India’s legal requirements and policy goals as formal axioms, we show that the DA-BT mechanism is unique for the concurrent implementation of reservation and de-reservation policies. This paper was accepted by Yan Chen, behavioral economics and decision analysis.