arXiv subjects

Charles Po-Cheng Huang

Publications and source records attributed to Charles Po-Cheng Huang.

3 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2026

Certifying Priority in Evidence-Based Allocation

Many allocation rules give priority to applicants satisfying favored conditions, including disability, homelessness, and veteran status. Because these conditions are not directly observed, a rule ranking applicants by characteristics must first determine what submitted certificates prove. This paper studies allocation with hard but partial evidence: a disability document may prove disability without proving the absence of a disqualifying tenancy record. A claim is certifiable exactly when every intended claimant has a feasible certificate excluding all outsiders. Chain rules---scores, lexicographic orders, and scalar rankings---require certification of every priority cutoff, whereas reserve rules require certification of each eligibility class. Allocation rules thus select the claim family to be certified. When certification fails, canonical repairs demote unsupported chain priorities and delete unsupported reserve labels. Nonempty reserve eligibility classes can be represented as upper contours of a single chain if and only if they are nested. A housing application illustrates the consequences.

econ.TH↗

arXiv2026

College Admissions with Scholarship

Merit-based scholarships are widely used to attract high-achieving students, but do they guarantee an improvement in the merit of a university's student pool? We study this question in centralized college admissions using a matching with contracts framework. We first introduce the scholarship choice rule, which processes scholarship levels from highest to lowest and selects the highest-merit students at each level. We show that scholarship feasibility, scholarship maximality, and no justified envy uniquely characterize this rule. We further characterize the student-proposing deferred-acceptance mechanism based on this rule as the unique mechanism, up to outcome equivalence, satisfying the extensions of the three axioms, together with individual rationality, and strategy-proofness. We then study the welfare effects of scholarship provision. In general matching markets, a university may be matched with lower-merit students after introducing a scholarship. Finally, when all schools use the scholarship choice rule and every student is eligible for every scholarship level a school offers, we show that a common merit ranking is necessary and sufficient for scholarship provision to guarantee, for every student-preference profile satisfying within-school monotonicity, a weak improvement in the scholarship-providing school's student pool.

econ.TH↗

arXiv2026

Screening Workers with Affirmative Action

This paper examines the optimal contracts in a two-dimensional screening model where one dimension (group identity) is verifiable by agents but not falsifiable. A principal offers contracts to agents who differ in cost types and group membership. Motivated by the United States Federal policy, Work Opportunity Tax Credit (WOTC), the principal receives tax benefits for hiring agents from protected groups. Under the assumption that the protected agents tend to have higher cost types, the optimal contract induces full separation across both dimensions: agents reveal the cost type and the group identity through contract choice. Furthermore, the principal is willing to hire the trait agents up to a higher cost threshold than the non-trait agents, and this threshold increases with the tax credit. Conversely, when the protected agents tend to have lower cost types, the optimal design without tax credits pools groups while separating by cost type. These results demonstrate that both affirmative action and non-discrimination can be optimal depending on the cost distribution ordering across groups.

econ.TH↗