To achieve faculty status, graduating doctoral students have to substantially outperform their peers, given the competitive nature of the academic job market. In an ideal, meritocratic world, factors such as prestige of degree-granting university ought not to overly influence hiring decisions. However, it has recently been reported that top-ranked universities produced about 2-6 times more facu...

Exempted from the application of reservation policies at first, the Indian Institutes of Technologytend to be perceived as institutions that produce a meritocratic elite, freed from thecontingencies related to caste and their political exploitation. However, some former students,products of this institution that was marked by a very strong social homogeneity when it wasfirst con...

Research on representative bureaucracy has failed to deal with whether or not representative bureaucracies produce minority gains at the expense of nonminorities. Using a pooled time series analysis of 350 school districts over six years, this study examines the relationship between representative bureaucracy and organizational outputs for minorities and nonminorities. Far from finding that rep...

We study fairness in the linear bandit setting. Starting from the notion of meritocratic fairness introduced in Joseph et al. [11], we introduce a sufficiently more general model in which meritocratic fairness can be imposed and satisfied. We then perform a more fine-grained analysis which achieves better performance guarantees in this more general model. Our work therefore studies fairness for...

THIS BOOK examines the constitutional dimensions of the welfare debate in America. The precise shape of state-facilitated welfare here and elsewhere will depend on results of policy experiments either under way or anticipated and on the contest among philosophic frameworks for describing those results. Because I share to some limited extent the conventional view that constitutional questions di...

In Government of paper, Matthew Hull has given us one of the most finely grained, ethnographically rich analyses of the role of material artifacts in the working of states. His focus on files, maps, the parchi and the petition, and lists and land records, is a sorely needed addition to the ethnographic record. As a linguistic anthropologist, he is uniquely positioned to reflect on the linguisti...

The last two decades of forest policy discussions have been dominated by calls for sustainable management of forest resources. Consequently, multiple international and domestic policies, supporting sustainable forest management (SFM), have evolved in numerous jurisdictions. Policies in developing countries often rely on foreign donors’ projects, which supplement domestic SFM policy. These polic...

A system is said to be meritocratic if the compensation and power available to individuals is determined by their abilities and merits. A system is topocratic if the compensation and power available to an individual is determined primarily by her position in a network. Here we introduce a model that is perfectly meritocratic for fully connected networks but that becomes topocratic for sparse ne...