Equitable decision making approaches over allocations of multiple benefits to multiple entities

Abstract

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.