Associate Professor Inácio Bó from the Department of Economics of FSS has recently been awarded funding from National Natural Science Foundation of China (NSFC) for his project “Centralized Market Design Reform Based on Theory and Experiments: Policy Insights from Public Recruitment and Higher Education Admissions”. The project is dedicated to advancing optimized approaches to centralized market design, with a particular emphasis on reforming public recruitment and higher education admissions systems. This research marks a significant breakthrough for Prof. Bó in the field of market design theory and stands as a testament to the team’s years of rigorous exploration and innovation in related disciplines.
The project’s central focus is on the Unified National Public Competition (CPNU) recently introduced in Brazil, one of the largest public-sector hiring reforms worldwide. Prof. Bó’s research applies market design methods to structure this overall procedure—ensuring that fairness rules are respected without sacrificing efficiency, and that valuable positions do not remain unfilled due to procedural constraints. Building on this, the project also develops the concept of visibly fair mechanisms, which reinforce trust by preventing outcomes that appear to violate priority rules, and examines how allowing participants to deliberately opt into randomization can be used as a design tool to improve welfare and diversity in allocation systems. By combining theory, large-scale CPNU and admissions data, and laboratory experiments, the research aims to produce both new scientific insights and actionable policy lessons for large-scale recruitment and education systems worldwide.
The NSFC is the country’s primary platform for supporting basic research, playing a key role in driving its high-quality development. UM has not only achieved a record number of funded projects, but has also made significant progress in terms of talent development and key projects, demonstrating its growing integration into the national innovation system.
Prof. Bó specializes in market design, matching theory, and experimental economics, with publications in leading international journals. His research often bridges theory and practice, contributing both to academic understanding and to large-scale policy reforms. He has been directly involved in the design of Brazil’s major public-sector hiring and university admissions reforms.
