55 research outputs found
Combining Outcome-Based and Preference-Based Matching: A Constrained Priority Mechanism
We introduce a constrained priority mechanism that combines outcome-based
matching from machine-learning with preference-based allocation schemes common
in market design. Using real-world data, we illustrate how our mechanism could
be applied to the assignment of refugee families to host country locations, and
kindergarteners to schools. Our mechanism allows a planner to first specify a
threshold for the minimum acceptable average outcome score that should
be achieved by the assignment. In the refugee matching context, this score
corresponds to the predicted probability of employment, while in the student
assignment context it corresponds to standardized test scores. The mechanism is
a priority mechanism that considers both outcomes and preferences by assigning
agents (refugee families, students) based on their preferences, but subject to
meeting the planner's specified threshold. The mechanism is both strategy-proof
and constrained efficient in that it always generates a matching that is not
Pareto dominated by any other matching that respects the planner's threshold.Comment: This manuscript has been accepted for publication by Political
Analysis and will appear in a revised form subject to peer review and/or
input from the journal's editor. End-users of this manuscript may only make
use of it for private research and study and may not distribute it furthe
How economic, humanitarian, and religious concerns shape European attitudes toward asylum seekers
What types of asylum seekers are Europeans willing to accept? We conducted a conjoint experiment asking 18,000 eligible voters in 15 European countries to evaluate 180,000 profiles of asylum seekers that randomly varied on nine attributes. Asylum seekers who have higher employability, have more consistent asylum testimonies and severe vulnerabilities, and are Christian rather than Muslim received the greatest public support. These results suggest that public preferences over asylum seekers are shaped by sociotropic evaluations of their potential economic contributions, humanitarian concerns about the deservingness of their claims, and anti-Muslim bias. These preferences are similar across respondents of different age, education, income, and political ideology, as well as across the surveyed countries. This public consensus on what types of asylum seekers to accept has important implications for theory and policy
Learning under random distributional shifts
Many existing approaches for generating predictions in settings with
distribution shift model distribution shifts as adversarial or low-rank in
suitable representations. In various real-world settings, however, we might
expect shifts to arise through the superposition of many small and random
changes in the population and environment. Thus, we consider a class of random
distribution shift models that capture arbitrary changes in the underlying
covariate space, and dense, random shocks to the relationship between the
covariates and the outcomes. In this setting, we characterize the benefits and
drawbacks of several alternative prediction strategies: the standard approach
that directly predicts the long-term outcome of interest, the proxy approach
that directly predicts a shorter-term proxy outcome, and a hybrid approach that
utilizes both the long-term policy outcome and (shorter-term) proxy outcome(s).
We show that the hybrid approach is robust to the strength of the distribution
shift and the proxy relationship. We apply this method to datasets in two
high-impact domains: asylum-seeker assignment and early childhood education. In
both settings, we find that the proposed approach results in substantially
lower mean-squared error than current approaches
Using eye-tracking to understand decision-making in conjoint experiments
Conjoint experiments are popular, but there is a paucity of research on respondents' underlying decision-making processes. We leverage eye-Tracking methodology and a series of conjoint experiments, administered to university students and local community members, to examine how respondents process information in conjoint surveys. There are two main findings. First, attribute importance measures inferred from the stated choice data are correlated with attribute importance measures based on eye movement. This validation test supports the interpretation of common conjoint metrics, such as average marginal component effects (AMCEs), as measures of attribute importance. Second, when we experimentally increase the number of attributes and profiles in the conjoint table, respondents view a larger absolute number of cells but a smaller fraction of the total cells displayed. Moving from two to three profiles, respondents search more within-profile, rather than within-Attribute, to build summary evaluations. However, respondents' stated choices remain fairly stable regardless of the number of attributes and profiles in the conjoint table. Together, these patterns speak to the robustness of conjoint experiments and are consistent with a bounded rationality mechanism. Respondents adapt to complexity by selectively incorporating relevant new information to focus on important attributes, while ignoring less relevant information to reduce cognitive processing costs
Europeans support a proportional allocation of asylum seekers
What type of common asylum regime would Europeans support? We conducted a survey asking 18,000 citizens of 15 European countries about their preferences regarding different mechanisms for allocating asylum seekers across countries. A large majority supports an allocation that is proportional to each country’s capacity over the status quo policy of allocation based on the country of first entry. This majority support is weakened but persists even among a randomly assigned subset of respondents who were made aware that moving to proportional allocation would increase the number of asylum seekers allocated to their own country. These results suggest that citizens care deeply about the fairness of the responsibility-sharing mechanism, rather than only the consequences of the asylum policy. The findings also highlight a potential pathway towards reform of the Common European Asylum System
Europeans would accept more Refugees—if the asylum system were fair
Kirk Bansak, Jens Hainmueller and Dominik Hangartner’s study of the European refugee crisis shows broad support across Europe for the proportional allocation of asylum seekers
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