SIER Working Paper Series

We consider a problem of assigning slots to a group of agents. Each slot can serve only one agent at a time and it is located along a line. Each agent has a most preferred slot and incurs disutility when she is assigned away from the most preferred slot. Furthermore, we assume that each agent’s utility is equal to the amount of monetary transfer minus the distance from the peak to her assigned slot. In this paper, we investigate how to assign slots to agents in an efficient and fair way. First, by using a bipartite graph of the slot allocation problem, we present a simple way of identifying all efficient assignments. Next, we introduce two allocation rules for the problem, the leximin and the leximax rules, and discuss their properties.