A Decision and Value Approach to Research Personnel Allocation

Martin Childs and Harvey Wolfe
Additional contact information
Martin Childs: University of Pittsburgh
Harvey Wolfe: University of Pittsburgh

Management Science, 1972, vol. 18, issue 6, B269-B278

Abstract: A problem which exists in a large research laboratory is the allocation of professional people to work on research projects. Each department manager must allocate his personnel so that effectiveness, value of a given man to a given project, is maximized. Computationally, the transportation technique may be used to solve the problem if it is possible to determine the individual coefficients (or effectiveness values) giving the relative value of the ith man to the jth project, for all i, j. This paper describes a technique for determining these effectiveness values. The effectiveness values are subjective, and reflect the value judgments of the department manager and of those who assign projects. The philosophy used in producing the effectiveness values is to simplify the manager's decisionmaking task in expressing his value judgments to comparing only two alternatives with respect to a single criterion at one time. The results of the ratings taken are reduced to produce a set of normalized effectiveness values. The use of the technique in a model allocation problem is shown. The application of the technique need not be confined to a personnel allocation problem, but can be applied to any resource allocation problem where the objective is to optimize a subjective measure.

Date: 1972
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://dx.doi.org/10.1287/mnsc.18.6.B269 (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:inm:ormnsc:v:18:y:1972:i:6:p:b269-b278

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in Management Science from INFORMS Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Chris Asher ().