This paper examines the degree of elitism of public education under two different social objectives. It illustrates a potential conflict between welfare and social mobility. In the absence of private supplementary education, utilitarian welfare increases with the degree of elitism of the public education system. On the other hand, elitism decreases the steady state proportion of heterogenous dy...

Though it has been claimed that elitism could improve evolutionary multi-objective search significantly, a thorough and extensive evaluation of its effects is still missing. Guidelines on how elitism could successfully be incorporated have not yet been developed. This paper presents a unified model of multi-objective evolutionary algorithms, in which arbitrary variation and selection operators ...

Most discrete evolutionary algorithms (EAs) implement elitism, meaning that they make the biologically implausible assumption fittest individuals never die. While elitism favours exploitation and ensures best seen solutions are not lost, it has been widely conjectured non-elitism is necessary to explore promising fitness valleys without getting stuck in local optima. Determining when non-elitis...

Elitism and sharing are two mechanisms that are believed to improve the performance of a multiobjective evolutionary algorithm (MOEA). Using a new empirical inquiry framework, this paper studies the effect of elitism and sharing design choices using a benchmark suite of two-criterion problems. Performance is assessed, via known metrics, in terms of both closeness to the true Pareto-optimal fron...

In this paper the effects of elitism in the Nondominated Sorting Genetic Algorithm (NSGA) are analyzed. Three different kinds of elitism: standard, clustering and Parks & Miller techniques are investigated using two test problems. For the studied problems, the Parks & Miller mechanism generated the best results. Finally, the NSGA with Parks & Miller elitism was applied to determine the nondomin...

This paper shows that the design of education policy involves a potential conflict between welfare and social mobility. We consider a setting in which social mobility is maximized under the least elitist public education system, whereas welfare maximization calls for the most elitist system. We show that when private education is available, the degree of elitism that maximizes social mobility i...