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ATAL
2010
Springer

Finding approximate competitive equilibria: efficient and fair course allocation

14 years 16 days ago
Finding approximate competitive equilibria: efficient and fair course allocation
In the course allocation problem, a university administrator seeks to efficiently and fairly allocate schedules of over-demanded courses to students with heterogeneous preferences. We investigate how to computationally implement a recently-proposed theoretical solution to this problem (Budish, 2009) which uses approximate competitive equilibria to balance notions of efficiency, fairness, and incentives. Despite the apparent similarity to the well-known combinatorial auction problem we show that no polynomial-size mixedinteger program (MIP) can solve our problem. Instead, we develop a two-level search process: at the master level, the center uses tabu search over the union of two distinct neighborhoods to suggest prices; at the agent level, we use MIPs to solve for student demands in parallel at the current prices. Our method scales near-optimally in the number of processors used and is able to solve realistic-size problems fast enough to be usable in practice. Categories and Subject D...
Abraham Othman, Tuomas Sandholm, Eric Budish
Added 08 Nov 2010
Updated 08 Nov 2010
Type Conference
Year 2010
Where ATAL
Authors Abraham Othman, Tuomas Sandholm, Eric Budish
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