Designing Heaven's Will: The job assignment in the Chinese imperial civil service

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Bó, Inácio, Chen, Li
Format: Preprint
Published: 2021
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author Bó, Inácio
Chen, Li
author_facet Bó, Inácio
Chen, Li
contents We provide an original analysis of historical documents to describe the assignment procedures used to allocate entry-level civil service jobs in China from the tenth to the early twentieth century. The procedures tried to take different objectives into account through trial and error. By constructing a formal model that combines these procedures into a common framework, we compare their effectiveness in minimizing unfilled jobs and prioritizing high-level posts. We show that the problem was inherently complex such that changes made to improve the outcome could have the opposite effect. Based on a small modification of the last procedure used, we provide a new mechanism for producing maximum matchings under constraints in a transparent and public way.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2105_02457
institution arXiv
publishDate 2021
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Designing Heaven's Will: The job assignment in the Chinese imperial civil service
Bó, Inácio
Chen, Li
Theoretical Economics
We provide an original analysis of historical documents to describe the assignment procedures used to allocate entry-level civil service jobs in China from the tenth to the early twentieth century. The procedures tried to take different objectives into account through trial and error. By constructing a formal model that combines these procedures into a common framework, we compare their effectiveness in minimizing unfilled jobs and prioritizing high-level posts. We show that the problem was inherently complex such that changes made to improve the outcome could have the opposite effect. Based on a small modification of the last procedure used, we provide a new mechanism for producing maximum matchings under constraints in a transparent and public way.
title Designing Heaven's Will: The job assignment in the Chinese imperial civil service
topic Theoretical Economics
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2105.02457