Balanced contributions, balanced cost reduction and balanced transfers for sequencing problems. Bezoeker: Prof. dr. Y. Chun.

Sequencing problems consider situations where jobs or agents are waiting in a queue in order to be served by some facility. The facility can handle only one agent at a time and agents incur waiting costs. To obtain efficiency, one is interested in finding the order in which to serve the agents. Main question of this research is to find monetary compensations that agents who are served first must pay to agents who are served last. Each agents utility is equal to his monetary compensations minus his total waiting cost. The first purpose of this research project is to investigate how certain allocation (and compensation) rules respond to changes in the parameters of the problem, in particular to changes in the set of agents. For example, balanced contributions requires that the effect on the payoff from the departure of one agent to another agent should be equal between any two agents. Another axiom is balanced cost reduction, which requires that if one agent leaves the problem, then the total payoffs of the remaining agents should be affected by the amount previously assigned to the leaving agent. We will apply these properties to axiomatize different rules, in particular the minimal and maximal transfer rule. Instead of considering the effect on the payoffs of players we also want to consider the effects on the transfers (compensations) itself. This is important when applying these rules in real life situations since one often is more concerned with the actual transfer payment that is to be made or received than the utility outcome.