Processing Reserves Simultaneously

Abstract

Policymakers frequently use reserve categories to combine competing objectives in allocating scarce resources based on priority. For example, schools may prioritize students from underprivileged backgrounds for some of their seats while allocating the rest of them based solely on academic merit. The order in which different categories are processed has been shown to have an important, yet subtle impact on allocative outcomes---and has led to unintended consequences in practice. I introduce a new, more transparent way of processing reserves, which handles all categories simultaneously. I provide an axiomatic characterization of my solution, showing that it satisfies basic desiderata as well as category neutrality : if an agent qualifies for n categories, she takes $1/n$ units from each of them. A practical advantage of this approach is that the relative importance of categories is entirely captured by their quotas.