Verifiable affirmative action in school admissions (opens in new tab)

In many reserve-based affirmative action systems, admission cutoffs are publicly disclosed to enable students to verify whether reserved seats are correctly assigned. We introduce a verifiability criterion: each student must be able to confirm her assigned school and seat type using only her own score and the disclosed cutoffs, under two intuitive verification protocols. We show that a mechanism is individually rational, strategy-proof, and ...