Approaches to the Algorithmic Allocation of Public Resources: A Cross-disciplinary Review

Allocation of scarce resources is a recurring challenge for the public sector: something that emerges in areas as diverse as healthcare, disaster recovery, and social welfare. The complexity of these policy domains and the need for meeting multiple and sometimes conflicting criteria has led to increased focus on the use of algorithms in this type of decision. However, little engagement between researchers across these domains has happened, meaning a lack of understanding of common problems and techniques for approaching them. Here, we performed a cross disciplinary literature review to understand approaches taken for different areas of algorithmic allocation including healthcare, organ transplantation, homelessness, disaster relief, and welfare. We initially identified 1070 papers by searching the literature, then six researchers went through them in two phases of screening resulting in 176 and 75 relevant papers respectively. We then analyzed the 75 papers from the lenses of optimization goals, techniques, interpretability, flexibility, bias, ethical considerations, and performance. We categorized approaches into human-oriented versus resource-oriented perspective, and individual versus aggregate and identified that 76% of the papers approached the problem from a human perspective and 60% from an aggregate level using optimization techniques. We found considerable potential for performance gains, with optimization techniques often decreasing waiting times and increasing success rate by as much as 50%. However, there was a lack of attention to responsible innovation: only around one third of the papers considered ethical issues in choosing the optimization goals while just a very few of them paid attention to the bias issues. Our work can serve as a guide for policy makers and researchers wanting to use an algorithm for addressing a resource allocation problem.