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Itai Ashlagi Receives the MSOM Service Management SIG Best Paper Award

Itai Ashlagi and former student Peng Shi received the 2017 MSOM Service Management SIG Best Paper Award from INFORMS.

Congratulations to Professor Itai Ashlagi on receiving this award!

Paper Title:

Optimal Allocation Without Money: An Engineering Approach

Abstract:

Studying the allocation of heterogeneous services to agents with incomplete information and without monetary transfers. Agents have private, multidimensional utilities over services, drawn from commonly known priors. The social planner’s goal is to maximize a potentially complex public objective. For tractability, we take an “engineering” approach, in which we solve a large-market approximation, and convert the solution into a feasible finite-market mechanism that still yields good results. We apply this framework to real data from Boston to design a mechanism that assigns students to public schools, in order to maximize a linear combination of utilitarian and max-min welfare, subject to capacity and transportation constraints. We show how to optimally solve a large-market formulation with more than 868 types of students and 77 schools, and we translate the solution into a finite-market mechanism that significantly outperforms the baseline plan chosen by the city in terms of efficiency, equity, and predictability.

About the Award:

The Manufacturing & Service Operations Management (M&SOM) Service Management SIG (Special Interest Group) invites nominations for the best published paper(s) on service management.