Re: Student Project Allocation

On Thu, 21 Jun 2007 06:28:45 -0700, bentarm123@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx wrote:

I'm currently doing a Masters dissertation on the subject of
allocating projects to students in a university environment in order
to make the students as happy as possible. Obviously, one problem with
the "as happy as possible" in the previous sentence is that there is
no market involved. The students simply say what their favourite
projects are and we assign them as good a project as possible (bearing
in mind the other students preferences).

However, this has raised an interesting question. If it *were*
feasible to introduce a market to the situation, how should the market
be structured in order to ensure a "maximum utility" allocation of
projects. If the students were simply allowed to buy their projects
from the lecturers, and the prices allowed to set themselves (and
assuming the lecturers are indifferent about which student they work
with, and so only interested in maximising their income), is there any
good reason to believe the resulting allocation would be optimal?

I'm not an economist, I'm a maths student, so I'm just throwing things
out here - sorry if the question is either really obvious or too badly
posed to be answerable.

The setup you describe ought to produce a "Pareto optimal" outcome,
meaning that it is optimal in the sense that you can't make any
student happier without making another unhappier.

It does not necessarily maximize "social welfare," in that you might
have does objective about how "happiness" is distributed across
students.

-*** Startz
.