Assigning agents to a line

Jens Hougaard (), Juan Moreno-Ternero and Lars Peter Østerdal

No 14.01, Working Papers from Universidad Pablo de Olavide, Department of Economics

Abstract: We consider the problem of assigning agents to slots on a line, where only one agent can be served at a slot and each agent prefers to be served as close as possible to his target. Our focus is on aggregate gap minimizing methods, i.e., those that minimize the total gap between targets and assigned slots. We first consider deterministic assignment of agents to slots, and provide a direct method for testing if a given deterministic assignment is aggregate gap minimizing. We then consider probabilistic assignment of agents to slots, and make use of the previous method to propose an aggregate gap minimizing modification of the classic random priority method to solve this class of problems. We also provide some logical relations in our setting among standard axioms in the literature on assignment problems, and explore the robustness of our results to several extensions of our setting.

Keywords: Probabilistic assignment; random priority; aggregate gap minimizing; sd-efficiency; bottleneck (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C78 D61 D63 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 29 pages
Date: 2014-03
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-gth
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (7)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.upo.es/serv/bib/wps/econ1401.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: Assigning agents to a line (2014)
Working Paper: Assigning agents to a line (2014)
Working Paper: Assigning agents to a line (2013)
Working Paper: Assigning agents to a line (2012)
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:pab:wpaper:14.01

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Working Papers from Universidad Pablo de Olavide, Department of Economics Carretera de Utrera km.1, 41013 Sevilla. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Publicación Digital - UPO ().