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

• Tác giả: Inácio Bó, Li Chen
• Ngôn ngữ: eng
• Ký hiệu phân loại: 895.14 Literatures of East and Southeast Asia Sino-Tibetan literatures
• Thông tin xuất bản: 2021
• Bộ sưu tập: Metadata
• ID: 166909

Tóm tắt

We provide an original analysis of historical documents to describe the assignment procedures used to allocate entry-level civil service jobs in China from the tenth to the early twentieth century.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.