Publications and Papers on Awarding Prizes Randomly
Significant Papers (not by me):
   Random Audits and Regulatory Compliance (2019 paper) Auditing is a form of Quality Control for accountants. This paper explains why picking items to be audited at random is good. (as any statistician versed in SPC could have told them!). Good to see the many uses for our handy tool of 'picking at random'. Fair, efficient free from human bias, so much better than human judgement?

Ballots in school admissions (May 2007) What do parents think of lotteries for school places? Original research commissioned from MORI shows that they can be won round to the idea when the real nature of random selection is understood, and the alternatives are rejected. From The Sutton (Education Research) Trust

   The Use of Lottery Systems in School Admissions (Jan 2007) A Working Paper from RAND Europe in support of the previous publication. An overview of some of the lottery school allocation systems in use in various countries.


Papers by Conall Boyle, includes some unpublished.
Does School Choice Work? the way the 'experts' tell us? Does choice of school really drive up standards generally, or even benefit the pupils? The happy accident of lottery allocation provides the scientific answer. A 2011 paper from the Royal Statistical Society blog.

Lotteries for Education: The BOOK (2010) 'Lotteries for Education: Origins, experiences, lessons' is the full-length book published by Imprint Academic. I've provided a link here for anyone searching for a specific topic. You can still buy the book direct from the publishers, Amazon etc.!

Lotteries, tragic and gay (Nov 2008) Lottery choosing may be tragic for the winners and losers, or might be a bit of 'gaiety'. This paper explores why some choices are tragic, some gay and what this implies for advocates of lottery choosing.

Practical Lotteries -just the job! (paper) - (slides for talk) (Sept 2008) Politics Conference at Manchester Metro Uni: How the use of lotteries in hiring, firing and promotion would be both Efficient and Fair in Market Democracies

England expects school choice by proper lotteries! (Jan 2007) from the Admissions Code: How to run allocation lotteries.

Coops and Lotteries (Sep 2006) Paper at Conference UWIC 'Reclaiming the Economy' Powerpoint Slides

Parental School Choice and Lotteries - The Birth of an Idea (July 2006) working paper, how England's Education Dept decided random allocation was OK

Who gets the prize: the case for random distribution in non-market allocation (Feb 2006) M Phil thesis, Economics Department, University of Wales, Swansea

Durham Miners and the Cavil (Nov 2005) working paper Economics Department, University of Wales, Swansea

US student housing lottery (2004) This is how some US universities hand out student accommodation

Measuring Happiness: A pilot study (Sep 2003) survey on students at Swansea University, Economics Course

Reform of the House of Lords (1998-9) Correspondence with Commission and Demos

Organizations selecting people: How the process could be made fairer by the appropriate use of lotteries (1998) Journal of the Royal Statistical Society D

Is random fair? (1995) Royal Statistical Society Annual Conference, Telford

Fairness in allocation of Social Rented Housing (Aug 1994) European Network for Housing Research, Glasgow Conference

Social Invention: Random Selection (1987) Proposal to The Institute for Social Inventions

Share-out of Council Houses Unfair? (1985) An example of racial discrimination which could be fixed with random share-out

Another King: Unfair to girls? (1982) The random chance of birth choosing monarchy.

Randomness in Public Administration (1980) Dept of Mathematics and Statistics, Birmingham Polytechnic: Occasional Paper
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