  Since 1950, India has instituted an intricate affirmative action program
through a meticulously designed reservation system. This system incorporates
vertical and horizontal reservations to address historically marginalized
groups' socioeconomic imbalances. Vertical reservations designate specific
quotas of available positions in publicly funded educational institutions and
government employment for Scheduled Castes, Scheduled Tribes, Other Backward
Classes, and Economically Weaker Sections. Concurrently, horizontal
reservations are employed within each vertical category to allocate positions
for additional subgroups, such as women and individuals with disabilities. In
educational admissions, the legal framework recommended that unfilled positions
reserved for the OBC category revert to unreserved status. Moreover, we
document that individuals from vertically reserved categories have more
complicated preferences over institution-vertical category position pairs, even
though authorities only elicit their preferences over institutions. To address
these challenges, the present paper proposes a novel class of choice rules,
termed the Generalized Lexicographic (GL) choice rules. This class is
comprehensive, subsuming the most salient priority structures discussed in the
extant matching literature. Utilizing the GL choice rules and the deferred
acceptance mechanism, we present a robust framework that generates equitable
and effective solutions for resource allocation problems in the Indian context.

Theoretical Economics