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.