Designing Heaven’S Will: The Job Assignment in the Chinese Imperial Civil Service

We provide an original analysis of historical documents to describe the assignment procedures used to allocate entry-level civil service jobs in China from the tenth to the early twentieth century.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