Equipment Time Scheduling with Package Auctions

In many disciplines success depends on access to scarce resources, such as unique instruments. Research on computersupported cooperative work (CSCW) has contributed to the development of technologies, such as collaboratories, that broaden access to scarce scientific and engineering resources. While broader access is often applauded, little attention has been focused on the problem of equitable and efficient resource allocation in the face of increased demand created through collaboratory use. This paper, then, applies concepts from the economic discipline of mechanism design to compare different resource allocation schemes (RAD, Vickery, and knapsack) within a hypothetical collaboratory. Experimental results show that knapsack achieves a more equitable distribution of resources than RAD or Vickery, but that RAD and Vickery are both more efficient than knapsack. The findings highlight the need for systematic exploration of allocation mechanisms within collaboratories, where simple optimization (e.g., knapsack) is likely to produce a sub-optimal match of resources to needs. More generally, the findings illustrate the utility of economic approaches in understanding issues that emerge in large-scale collaborations, such as entire scientific and engineering communities, that have not typically been the subject of CSCW research. ∗(Produces the permission block, and copyright information). For use with SIG-ALTERNATE.CLS. Supported by ACM. †A full version of this paper is available as Author’s Guide to Preparing ACM SIG Proceedings Using LTEX2ǫ and BibTeX at www.acm.org/eaddress.htm ‡The SI authors. §The econ author. Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. To copy otherwise, to republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. WOODSTOCK ’97 El Paso, Texas USA Copyright 200X ACM X-XXXXX-XX-X/XX/XX ...$5.00.