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September 10, 2025American Economic Journal Microeconomics

Asymmetric Players in a Meritocracy: A Case for Affirmative Action

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Authors

THTanjim HossainJMJohn Morgan

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Overview

Model reveals how entry costs and ability affect participation rates, suggesting affirmative action enhances representation.

Key Points

  • Affirmative action policies significantly increase participation rates of disadvantaged players, enhancing social welfare.
  • Differences in ability distributions and entry costs can lead to large disparities in representation among similar groups.
  • The model demonstrates that small differences among entrants drastically affect their equilibrium probabilities of entry.
  • Handicapping advantaged players can help level the playing field, resulting in more equitable outcomes.

Cite This Study

Hossain et al. (2025) studied this question.

synapsesocial.com/papers/68c1aacc54b1d3bfb60e36d7https://doi.org/10.1257/mic.20220362
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Also Consider

Synapse has enriched 5 closely related papers on similar clinical questions. Consider them for comparative context:

  1. 1Using Affirmative Action as a Tiebreaker2025
  2. 2Meritocracy and its discontents2025 · 4 citations
  3. 3Affirmative action without competition2024 · 1 citations
  4. 4The fallacy of meritocracy in the real-life social order2026
  5. 5Belief in a diversity–meritocracy trade-off.2026 · 1 citations