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

TL;DR

This paper analyzes historical Chinese civil service job assignment procedures, modeling their effectiveness and proposing a new mechanism for optimal matching under constraints.

Contribution

It constructs a formal framework to compare historical procedures and introduces a novel, transparent mechanism for maximum matchings with constraints.

Findings

Procedures aimed to balance multiple objectives through trial and error.

Complexity of the problem led to counterproductive changes.

A modified procedure achieves maximum matchings transparently.

Abstract

We provide an original analysis of historical documents to describe the assignment procedures used to allocate entry-level civil service jobs in China from the tenth to the early twentieth century.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