On the Efficiency-Fairness Trade-off
研究了在资源分配问题中如何设计兼顾效率与公平的目标函数，刻画了不同目标选择下的效率-公平权衡，并给出管理建议，以空中交通管理案例展示框架价值。
This paper deals with a basic issue: How does one approach the problem of designing the “right” objective for a given resource allocation problem? The notion of what is right can be fairly nebulous; we consider two issues that we see as key: efficiency and fairness. We approach the problem of designing objectives that account for the natural tension between efficiency and fairness in the context of a framework that captures a number of resource allocation problems of interest to managers. More precisely, we consider a rich family of objectives that have been well studied in the literature for their fairness properties. We deal with the problem of selecting the appropriate objective from this family. We characterize the trade-off achieved between efficiency and fairness as one selects different objectives and develop several concrete managerial prescriptions for the selection problem based on this trade-off. Finally, we demonstrate the value of our framework in a case study that considers air traffic management. This paper was accepted by Yossi Aviv, operations management.