Browsing by Subject "Interactive approaches"

Now showing 1 - 2 of 2

Open Access
Capturing preferences for inequality aversion in decision support
(Elsevier, 2018-01-16) Karsu, Özlem; Morton, A.; Argyris, N.
We investigate the situation where there is interest in ranking distributions (of income, of wealth, of health, of service levels) across a population, in which individuals are considered preferentially indistinguishable and where there is some limited information about social preferences. We use a natural dominance relation, generalised Lorenz dominance, used in welfare comparisons in economic theory. In some settings there may be additional information about preferences (for example, if there is policy statement that one distribution is preferred to another) and any dominance relation should respect such preferences. However, characterising this sort of conditional dominance relation (specifically, dominance with respect to the set of all symmetric increasing quasiconcave functions in line with given preference information) turns out to be computationally challenging. This challenge comes about because, through the assumption of symmetry, any one preference statement (“I prefer giving $100 to Jane and $110 to John over giving $150 to Jane and $90 to John”) implies a large number of other preference statements (“I prefer giving $110 to Jane and $100 to John over giving $150 to Jane and $90 to John”; “I prefer giving $100 to Jane and $110 to John over giving $90 to Jane and $150 to John”). We present theoretical results that help deal with these challenges and present tractable linear programming formulations for testing whether dominance holds between any given pair of distributions. We also propose an interactive decision support procedure for ranking a given set of distributions and demonstrate its performance through computational testing.
Open Access
Equitable decision making approaches over allocations of multiple benefits to multiple entities
(Elsevier, 2018) Kaynar, N.; Karsu, Özlem
In this study, we develop decision support tools for policy makers that will help them make choices among a set of allocation alternatives. We assume that alternatives are evaluated based on their benefits to different users and that there are multiple benefit (output) types to consider. We assume that the policy maker has both efficiency (maximizing total output) and equity (distributing outputs across different users as fair as possible) concerns. This problem is a multicriteria decision making problem where the alternatives are represented with matrices rather than vectors. We develop interactive algorithms that guide a policy maker to her most preferred solution, which are based on utility additive (UTA) and convex cone methods. Our computational experiments demonstrate the satisfactory performance of the algorithms. We believe that such decision support tools may be of great use in practice and help in moving towards fair and efficient allocation decisions.