[EM] Professorial Office Picking

[Abd ul-Rahman Lomax]

At 10:37 AM 1/23/2010, Michael Rouse wrote:
>Steven E. Landsburg (author of The Armchair Economist), had an 
>interesting problem here: 
><http://www.thebigquestions.com/2010/01/21/office-politics/>http://www.thebigquestions.com/2010/01/21/office-politics/ 
>(in reference to an original question of the New York Times ethics 
>column here: 
><http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/03/magazine/03FOB-Ethicist-t.html>http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/03/magazine/03FOB-Ethicist-t.html)
>
>Basically, you have a bunch of professors of different seniority 
>wanting a bunch of rooms of different desirability. The original 
>article at the Times suggested a lottery. Steven Landsburg suggested 
>a market, where professors bid what they wanted for a particular room.

What values are to be optimized by the choices? Surely the method 
used would depend on the goal!

How is the choice of method to be made? Is it a dictatorship, i.e., 
top-down decision-making structure? If it's a dictatorship, then a 
wise dictator would want to be advised by those affected by the 
choice, so that would involve collecting preference and preference 
strength information, first as to method of making the assignments, 
then as to actual assignment choices.

Normally, there would not be a lot of "move-in" assignments at once, 
unless there is a new building. Rather, I'd think, the presumption 
would be that once you have an office, and unless you want to move, 
you'd have the right to stay there. It's disruptive to move....

While it's possible to set up point-allocation system that would be a 
part of the compensation package for a professor, it's not clear that 
this would be sufficiently more functional than more informal 
methods. I'd suggest that the basic structural issue should be 
addressed first. To what extent does the general opinion of the 
professorial community matter? That of the students who will also be 
affected? Who is in charge?

Utility optimization could get hairy, as noted, but full optimization 
analysis might not be necessary. Rather a means of generating a 
utility value for a particular allocation could be developed and 
applied to relevant pairs. A rank order ballot, equal ranking 
allowed, cast by each professor, might provide useful information.