Fairness Under Affirmative Action Policies with Overlapping Reserves

We study the allocation of homogeneous positions under affirmative action policies where some positions are reserved for underrepresented groups on a “minimum guarantee” basis. Each individual has a merit-based score and may be eligible for multiple reserves. When an individual counts towards each of the reserves that she is eligible for upon admission, we propose a choice function that satisfies three properties: the minimum guarantee requirement, non-wastefulness, and a stronger fairness notion than the one introduced by Sönmez and Yenmez (2019). Moreover, our proposed choice function is the unique one that produces an assignment achieving the maximal cutoff score among all non-wasteful assignments satisfying the minimum guarantee requirement. Furthermore, we show that the outcome of this choice function is not score-wise dominated by any other assignment that satisfies the minimum guarantee requirement