Sequential Resource Allocation for Nonprofit Operations

Sequential Resource Allocation for Nonprofit Operations

This paper studies a sequential resource allocation problem motivated by distribution operations of a nonprofit organization. The alternate objectives that arise in nonprofit, as opposed to commercial, operations lead to new variations on traditional problems in operations research and inventory management. Specifically, we consider the problem of distributing a scarce resource to meet sequenti...

Resource and Revenue Management in Nonprofit Operations

Nonprofit firms sometimes engage in for-profit activities with the sole purpose of generating revenue to subsidize their mission activities. The organization is then confronted with a consumption vs. investment trade-off. Investment corresponds to the allocation of capacity for revenue customers, while consumption corresponds to serving mission customers. We model this problem as a multi-period...

Multiattribute Decision Making by Sequential Resource Allocation

A new approach is proposed for addressing decision problems in which the outcomes are multidimensional and possibly interdependent. The method is based on decomposing the problem into a sequence of simpler decision problems. The solution to each subproblem is elicited from the decisionmaker by converting it to a simple resource allocation task that may be solved by inspection. Our experience in...

Sequential Resource Allocation with Positional Costs

We consider the problem of minimizing the total cost to run a sequence of n tasks in the given order by k agents under the positional cost model. The cost to run a task not only depends on the intrinsic cost of the task itself, but also monotonically related to the position this task is in the working list of the agent assigned. Such a positional effect can naturally arise from the classic sum-...

On Bayesian index policies for sequential resource allocation