C3S2
The Clarkson Center for Complex Systems Science
Siddhartha Banerjee, Associate Professor, Operations Research at Cornell University
http://sidbanerjee.orie.cornell.edu/
Will present a talk entitled:
The Physics (and Ethics) of Fair Allocation
Abstract: In many settings, resources are allocated among people over time, without using monetary transfers: cloud resources among employees, food among food-banks, medical supplies between hospitals, funding between non-profit projects, etc. The underlying aim is to try and be ‘fair’ in these allocations…but what exactly do we mean?
Understanding fairness in decision-making is one of the most urgent (and also intellectually beautiful) topics today, with deep connections to economics, optimization, and normative philosophy. I will describe a foundational result from economics that serves as my lodestar, and build on it to give my opinions on what any theory of fairness in sequential decision-making should and should not do. My core thesis will be that, as academic researchers, our main task should be to characterize fundamental trade-off ‘laws’ between fairness and efficiency in different problem settings, as a guide to policy-makers to help choose which tradeoffs are socially relevant. I will illustrate this approach with a series of settings (inspired by work we have been doing with our local food-bank), where we have been able to characterize such trade-off laws between efficiency and fairness loss. Time permitting, I will outline how these ideas have been built on by us and others to understand fairness, efficiency and information trade-offs in more complex settings, as well as talk about practical tools that we have been building to help study these questions.
SC166
Friday, October 13th 2022
12:00 pm
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C3S2 Clarkson Center for Complex Systems Science l http://webspace.clarkson.edu/~ebollt/Website-C3S2/index.html
CLARKSON UNIVERSITY l Potsdam, New York 13699-5720