2021/01/21 by Hoda Heidari, Jon Kleinberg
Computer Science · Economics, Econometrics and Finance · Physics and Astronomy · Social Sciences · #Action (physics) #Affirmative action #Economic model #Income, Poverty, and Inequality #Intergenerational and Educational Inequality Studies #Labor market dynamics and wage inequality #Social mobility #Socioeconomic status #cs.CY #physics.soc-ph
paper · pdf · doi:10.1145/3442188.3445867
arxiv created 2021/01/21 · arxiv updated 2021/01/22 · openalex created_date 2021/02/01 · openalex publication_date 2021/02/25 · openalex updated_date 2026/08/05
Opportunities such as higher education can promote intergenerational mobility, leading individuals to achieve levels of socioeconomic status above that of their parents. We develop a dynamic model for allocating such opportunities in a society that exhibits bottlenecks in mobility; the problem of optimal allocation reflects a trade-off between the benefits conferred by the opportunities in the current generation and the potential to elevate the socioeconomic status of recipients, shaping the composition of future generations in ways that can benefit further from the opportunities. We show how optimal allocations in our model arise as solutions to continuous optimization problems over multiple generations, and we find in general that these optimal solutions can favor recipients of low socioeconomic status over slightly higher-performing individuals of high socioeconomic status --- a form of socioeconomic affirmative action that the society in our model discovers in the pursuit of purely payoff-maximizing goals. We characterize how the structure of the model can lead to either temporary or persistent affirmative action, and we consider extensions of the model with more complex processes modulating the movement between different levels of socioeconomic status.