| s Massy and Zemsky have said, "The 1990s have emerged as an era for re-asking fundamental questions about the productivity and efficiency of American enterprises and universities." And of the decisions made by American universities, the dean/provost makes one of the most difficult one--that of allocating an often very limited number of regular faculty lines as well as auxiliary faculty sections to competing departments.;To shed more light on this decision, I first extended Massy and Zemsky's Academic Decision-Making Project (ADMP) (departmental) by internalizing two more decision variables and introducing the cannibalization (redistribution) effect, and then solving econometrically. I then made use of the findings to arrive at three representative formulations of the dean's resource-allocation problem. The dean's problem is modeled as one of utility optimization under budgetary constraints, and the objectives are: maximizing the overall utility of the school; minimizing the utility differences among the departments in the school; as well as maximizing the dean's intrinsic valuation of the school's faculty, while ensuring that the departmental utilities are not sacrificed. These are all non-linearly constrained optimization problems.;I have implemented these formulations in... |
