Asymmetric Players in a Meritocracy: A Case for Affirmative Action
Bibliographic record
Abstract
We model decisions to apply for college admission, attend job auditions, or run for C-suite positions as costly entry into meritocracies, where the entrant with the highest ability wins a reward. Ability is privately known and players generically differ in commonly known characteristics such as ability distributions, entry costs, or payoffs from winning. Any infinitesimal difference leads to wildly different equilibrium entry probabilities, explaining large dispersion in representation of comparable but nonidentical population groups. Affirmative action policies such as handicapping advantaged players or surcharging them to subsidize disadvantaged players increase participation rates of disadvantaged players and, in return, increase social welfare. (JEL D82, J15, J16, J22, K31, M51)
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.005 | 0.014 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.003 | 0.008 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.006 | 0.005 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.006 | 0.005 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.019 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".