Fair Allocation

What are the methodologies for assessing and improving governmental policy in light of well-being? The Oxford Handbook of Well-Being and Public Policy provides a comprehensive, interdisciplinary treatment of this topic. The contributors draw from welfare economics, moral philosophy, and psychology and are leading scholars in these fields. The Handbook includes thirty chapters divided into four Parts. Part I covers the full range of methodologies for evaluating governmental policy and assessing societal condition-including both the leading approaches in current use by policymakers and academics (such as GDP, cost-benefit analysis, cost-effectiveness analysis, inequality and poverty metrics, and the concept of the "social welfare function"), and emerging techniques. Part II focuses on the nature of well-being. What, most fundamentally, determines whether an individual life is better or worse for the person living it? Her happiness? Her preference-satisfaction? Her attainment of various "objective goods"? Part III addresses the measurement of well-being and the thorny topic of interpersonal comparisons. How can we construct a meaningful scale of individual welfare, which allows for comparisons of well-being levels and differences, both within one individual's life, and across lives? Finally, Part IV reviews the major challenges to designing governmental policy around individual well-being.

This collection of six papers provides a valuable source of material on the real-world problem of allocating objects among competing claimants. The examples given show how mathematics, particularly the axiomatic method, can be applied to give insight into complex social problems. Originally presented as an AMS Short Course, these papers could serve as a suitable text for courses touching on game theory, decision sciences, economics, or quantitative political science. Most of the material is accessible to the mathematically mature undergraduate with a background in advanced calculus and algebra. Each article surveys the recent literature and includes statements and sketches of proofs, as well as unsolved problems which should excite student curiosity. The articles analyze the question of fair allocation via six examples: the apportionment of political representation, the measurement of income inequality, the allocation of joint costs, the levying of taxes, the design of voting laws, and the framing of auction procedures. In each of these examples fairness has a somewhat different significance, but common axiomatic threads reveal broad underlying principles. Each of the topics is concerned with norms of comparative equity for evaluating allocations or with standards of procedures for effecting them; it is this focus on normative properties which suggests that a mathematical analysis is appropriate. Though game theory provides a useful tool in many of these allocation problems, the emphasis here is on standards rather than strategy and equity rather than rationality, an approach which more accurately mirrors real-world social problems.

A comprehensive survey of computational aspects of collective decisions for graduate students, researchers, and professionals in computer science and economics.

Shows how mathematics, particularly the axiomatic method, can be applied to give insight into complex social problems. This collection provides material on the real-world problem of allocating objects among competing claimants. Each article surveys the literature and includes statements and sketches of proofs, as well as unsolved problems.

Health systems need to set priorities fairly. In one way or another, part of this important task will fall to physicians. How do they make judgments about resource stewardship, and how should they do so? How can they make such decisions in a manner that is compatible with their clinical duties to patients? In this book, philosophers, bioethicists, physicians, lawyers and health policy experts make the case that priority setting and rationing contribute significantly to the possibility of affordable and fair healthcare and that clinicians play an indispensable role in that process. The book depicts the results of a survey of European physicians about their experiences with rationing and other cost containment strategies, and their perception of scarcity and fairness in their health care systems. Responding to and complementing these findings, commentators discuss why resource allocation and bedside rationing is necessary and justifiable. The book explores how bedside rationing relates to clinical judgments about medical necessity and medical indications, marginal benefits, weak evidence based medicine, off-label use. The book highlights how comparative studies of health care systems can advance more effective and fair bedside rationing through learning from one another. From a practical standpoint, the book offers a number of strategies for health care systems and clinicians to work in tandem to allocate and ration resources as fairly as possible: how to foster more attention to fairness when rationing at the bedside, how to avoid exacerbating health disparities when allocating resources, how to teach about bedside rationing to students, how to discuss rationing more explicitly in the public arena and in the doctor's office.

This book provides a comprehensive introduction to the underlying theory, design techniques and analytical results of wireless communication networks, focusing on the core principles of wireless network design. It elaborates the network utility maximization (NUM) theory with applications in resource allocation of wireless networks, with a central aim of design and the QoS guarantee. It presents and discusses state-of-the-art developments in resource allocation and performance optimization in wireless communication networks. It provides an overview of the general background including the basic wireless communication networks and the relevant protocols, architectures, methods and algorithms.

This book provides an overview of existing methods for allocating costs and benefits. It will help readers evaluate the pros and cons of various methods involved in terms of factors such as fairness, consistency, stability, monotonicity and manipulability.