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

主讲人：Inacio Bo

时间：2021年06月02日（星期三）晚上20:00-22:00

地点：西南财经大学柳林校区弘远楼311室

主讲内容：

我们通过对历史文献的原创性分析，探讨从十世纪到二十世纪初中国用于分配初级公务员职位的分配程序的演变。随着时间的推移，出现了三个目标，分配程序试图通过试验错误来考虑这些目标：资格（根据学术学位衡量的能力，定义哪些工作适合候选人），回避规则（限制候选人被分配到他们的家乡），以及随机性（限制个人干扰）。通过构建一个正式的模型，将所有不同的程序结合到一个共同的框架中，我们从理论上比较了这些程序在效率（是否有最少的工人没有工作）和匹配性（是否有尽可能多的候选人被匹配到适合他们能力的工作）方面的有效性。我们发现，问题的内在复杂性是这样的：为提高结果的匹配性而做出的改变，乍一看会取得理想的结果，但却会产生相反的效果。

We use an original analysis of historical documents to explore the evolution of the assignment procedures that were used to allocate entry-level civil service jobs in China from the tenth to the early twentieth century. Three objectives emerged over time, which the assignment procedures tried to take into account through trial and error: eligibility (which defines what jobs are suitable for candidates according to their competence as measured by academic degrees), rule of avoidance (which restricts candidates from being assigned to their home regions), and randomness (which limits personal interference). By constructing a formal model that combines all the different procedures into a common framework, we theoretically compare the effectiveness of these procedures in terms of efficiency (whether the least number of workers are left without a job) and assortativeness (whether as many candidates as possible are matched to jobs fitting their competence). We show that the inherent complexity of the problem was such that changes made to improve the assortativeness of outcomes, which at first sight would have achieved that result could have had the opposite effect.