Designing Fair Ranking Schemes

Items from a database are often ranked based on a combination of multiple criteria. A user may have the flexibility to accept combinations that weigh these criteria differently, within limits. On the other hand, this choice of weights can greatly affect the fairness of the produced ranking. In this paper, we develop a system that helps users choose criterion weights that lead to greater fairness. We consider ranking functions that compute the score of each item as a weighted sum of (numeric) attribute values, and then sort items on their score. Each ranking function can be expressed as a vector of weights, or as a point in a multi-dimensional space. For a broad range of fairness criteria, we show how to efficiently identify regions in this space that satisfy these criteria. Using this identification method, our system is able to tell users whether their proposed ranking function satisfies the desired fairness criteria and, if it does not, to suggest the smallest modification that does. We develop user-controllable approximation that and indexing techniques that are applied during preprocessing, and support sub-second response times during the online phase. Our extensive experiments on real datasets demonstrate that our methods are able to find solutions that satisfy fairness criteria effectively and efficiently

Lady and the Trump: Status and Wealth in the Marriage Market

We examine a relatively neglected aspect of intergenerational transmission of economic standing, namely culturally determined status markers and their valuation in the marriage market. We take nobility to be such a status marker. Using data on Swedish marriages, we test the hypothesis that nobility have a greater probability of marrying up in terms of wealth. We find a large and statistically significant positive effect for nobility. This finding has important implications for the intergenerational transmission of inequality, and for the longevity of the institution of nobility itself

The Failure of American Socialism Reconsidered

Of all the questions that have bemused observers of political life in America, perhaps none has been as perplexing as that of why the United States, alone among the advanced industrial countries, never developed a truly mass-based socialist movement. Foreigners, in particular, have long been struck by the almost universal antipathy of Americans toward socialist ideas. Writing of the America of the 1830s, Tocqueville astutely observed that in no other country of the world is the love of property keener or more alert than in the United States, and nowhere else does the majority display less inclination toward doctrines which in any way threaten the way property is owned'. This attitude, Tocqueville argued, was uniquely suited to a society in which most of its members possessed property. Yet more than half a century later-and long after the formation of a massive wage-earning class-Engels, in a letter to Sorge, observed that the pervasive attachment to private property witnessed by Tocqueville persisted among American workers: 'It is remarkable,' he wrote, 'how firmly rooted are bourgeois prejudices even in the working class in such a young country.' Perhaps, suggested an exasperated Engels, the dogged resistance to socialist ideas among American proletarians reflected a pronounced theoretical backwardness: 'The Anglo-Saxon race-these damned Schleswig-Holsteiners, as Marx always called them-is slow-witted anyhow.

Power and ideology in education

136 p.; 20 cm