Ensuring multidimensional fairness in public service

Abstract

In this study, we focus on service planning problems, in which decisions lead to distributions of multiple benefits to multiple users, hence involve fairness and efficiency concerns in a multidimensional way. We develop two mathematical modeling-based approaches that incorporate these concerns in such problems. The first formulation aggregates the multidimensional efficiency concerns and multidimensional fairness concerns in a bi-objective model. The second formulation defines an objective function for each benefit, which maximizes the total social welfare obtained from that specific benefit distribution, hence results in an nobjective model, where n is the number of benefits. We illustrate and compare these approaches on an example public service provision problem.