Seminar by Özlem Karsu

Seminar by
Özlem Karsu
London School of Economics and Political Science

 

 

There are various real life problems where equity concerns naturally arise and it is important to address these concerns for the proposed solutions to be acceptable and implementable. In this seminar, we discuss methods to incorporate two equity-related concerns into the decision making process and seek equitable solutions to different operational research problems.
In the first part, we discuss a multi-criteria decision making approach to handle distributional equity concerns. We consider situations where we have person anonymity and quasi- concavity (convexity) conditions on the model of the decision maker’s (DM) preferences. For such situations, we provide an interactive solution process which takes the DM’s value judgments into account. We introduce substantial new theory and design an interactive ranking algorithm based on our theoretical findings.
In the second part, we discuss another equity-related concept: balance concerns in resource allocation decisions. These arise when the DM wants to achieve a desired balance in the allocation over different categories of entities. Unlike distributional equity concerns, balance concerns do not involve the anonymity assumption. We provide a bi-criteria framework to think about trading balance off against efficiency in resource allocation problems and propose optimization and heuristic algorithms for our bi-criteria allocation models. We illustrate our approach by applying it to a portfolio selection problem faced by a funding agency and to randomly generated large-sized problem instances to demonstrate computational feasibility.

 

Parts of this research are joint work with Prof. Alec Morton from the University of Strathclyde and Nikos Argyris from the University of Warwick.

Short Bio:
Özlem Karsu is a PhD candidate at the Operational Research (Management Science) Group at the London School of Economics. She received her B.S and M.S. degrees from the Industrial Engineering Department of the Middle East Technical University, where she worked as a teaching assistant between 2008 and 2010. She also received an MPhil degree in Operational Research from the London School of Economics in 2011. Her research interests include inequity-averse decisions in operational research, interactive multi-criteria decision making approaches and applications of assignment problems.