Allocating Bonus Points in Sequential Matchings with Preference Dynamics

Allocating bonus points (BP) in college admissions is a popular form of affirmative action aimed at increasing the representation of protected groups in different college programs. We propose to explore the effect of BP policies on the preferences and admission of future generations of applicants.Inspired by the Norwegian college admission system, we propose to model the repeated centralized college admission procedure as a Markov decision process (MDP) where students have evolving preferences and are admitted to different programs via a stable matching algorithm. Here, we assume that the current representation rate of a group in the different study programs affects the group's preferences in the next time step.Given this framework, we present two research objectives: 1) exploring trade-offs between student preference satisfaction, success and representation, and 2) analysing the existence, desirability and reachability of stable states.