In selection processes such as hiring, promotion, and college admissions, implicit bias toward socially-salient attributes such as race, gender, or sexual orientation produces persistent inequality and reduces utility for the decision-maker. Recent works show that interventions like the Rooney Rule, which require a minimum quota of individuals from each affected group, are very effective in improving utility when individuals belong to at most one affected group. However, in several settings, individuals belong to multiple affected groups and, consequently, face more extreme implicit bias due to this intersectionality. We consider independently drawn utilities and show that, with intersectionality, the aforementioned non-intersectional constraints only recover part of the utility achievable in the absence of implicit bias. On the other hand, we show that appropriate lower-bound constraints on the intersections recover almost all the utility achievable in the absence of implicit bias. And, hence, offer an advantage over non-intersectional approaches to reducing inequality.
We examine two-sided markets where players arrive stochastically over time and are drawn from a continuum of types. The cost of matching a client and provider varies, so a social planner is faced with two contending objectives: a) to reduce players’ waiting time before getting matched; and b) to form efficient pairs in order to reduce matching costs. We show that such markets are characterized by a quick or cheap dilemma: Under a large class of distributional assumptions, there is no `free lunch’, i.e., there exists no clearing schedule that is simultaneously optimal along both objectives. We further identify a unique breaking point signifying a stark reduction in matching cost contrasted by an increase in waiting time. Generalizing this model, we identify two regimes: one, where no free lunch exists; the other, where a window of opportunity opens to achieve a free lunch. Remarkably, greedy scheduling is never optimal in this setting.