Welfare optimization for resource allocation with peer effects.

ABSTRACT: Allocating students to schools or universities, people to teams or groups, people to urban housing, and matching users on social platforms are prominent examples of allocating limited goods, spaces, or positions to optimize social welfare. We study a welfare maximization problem that arises when such resource allocation scenarios involve peer effects, where people have preferences over the others who are nearby (e.g. their classmates, teammates, neighbors, or partners). We first develop a unified mathematical framework for this "position allocation problem," which assigns people to positions in a given network, with people caring about both their positions and their neighbors' attributes. We show that welfare maximization for the corresponding position allocation problem is computat

SUBMITTER: Qiu Z 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC12461859 | biostudies-literature | 2025 Sep

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature