Applications of OR III

Contributed Session

Time Slot: Wednesday Afternoon

Room: 001

Chair: Josep Freixas

Urban Poverty and Material Deprivation: A Spatial Efficiency Assessment

Time: 17:30

Jelena J. Stanković (University of Niš, Faculty of Economics, Serbia), Hedwig Yamu Claudia, Marjanović Ivana, Stanojević Marina

Urban poverty and inequality are one of the leading challenges facing modern society, with the main goal in most agendas being the need to eradicate urban poverty in all its forms and dimensions. Urban areas are, on the one hand, the bearers of economic growth and development and the cultural uplift of the population, while on the other hand, urban regions face complex and growing challenges related to population inequality. Reaching inclusive growth at the country level is based on achieving inclusive growth in urban areas, primarily bearing in mind that the majority of the world’s population lives in urban areas. The traditional practice of measuring the well-being of the population based on monitoring mainly economic performance has provided an inadequate presentation of the quality of socio-economic growth and development. Modern concepts of measuring well-being include both economic and social performance, with special attention to indicators related to material deprivation, poverty and social inclusion. However, the level of poverty and material deprivation of a population is traditionally defined on the basis of data on income or wealth. Yet, modern research indicates that poverty is a multidimensional concept and that the concept of inclusive growth is becoming dominant in today’s conditions. Achieving inclusive growth involves a complex process faced with numerous challenges. Achieving social inclusion, nurturing a sense of belonging, eradicating poverty and reducing social vulnerability stand out as important components of inclusive growth and development. Nevertheless, socioeconomic deprivation of the population in developing countries is usually quantified and monitored through census data, without taking into account the multidimensionality of this problem. Namely, the census data generally provide information on a particular aspect of socioeconomic deprivation, with the main focus on the percentage of the population at risk of poverty or social exclusion. Although the percentage of the population at risk of poverty or social exclusion is an important indicator of living conditions, its disadvantage is that it alone does not cover all dimensions of vulnerability, and in order to quantify the vulnerability of the population, it is necessary to create a multidimensional, comprehensive measure that encompasses various aspects of poverty, social exclusion and material deprivation. With that in mind, the main goal of this paper is to contribute to the development of a methodological approach that can be applied to assess urban poverty and material deprivation using data of urban areas of the Republic of Serbia. The model developed in the paper includes primary, unprocessed data collected by the Statistical Office of the Republic of Serbia in the Survey on Income and Living Conditions (SILC), as a part of EU Statistics on Income and Living Conditions (EU-SILC) covering the period from 2015 to 2020 and the analysis, i.e. grouping individual data according to the spatial area where they were collected. The assessment of urban poverty and material deprivation will be performed by creating a composite index using the Benefit of Doubt approach. The Benefit of Doubt approach is the variant of the Data Envelopment Analysis approach which is modified in the way that it contains only outputs, and can provide information on the reasons for the inefficiency of certain urban areas. Given that policymakers have limited budgets when making strategic decisions aimed at eradicating poverty and material deprivation, the results of the analysis can provide guidance on the needs of the most vulnerable regions, and prioritise the urban areas according to the identified shortcomings.

Postponing Complementary Services

Time: 17:50

Gabi Hanukov (Ariel University)

Studies on service systems and queueing theory classically assume that a customer who obtains service must be present in the system during the whole time the service is provided. However, as time passed, many service systems realized that part of the service can be performed while the customer is absent. The customer can use this time efficiently outside the system. Adopting this potentially favorable approach, we study a Markovian service system in which the service can be split into two phases: an opening service (OS), which can be provided only when the customer is present, and a complementary service (CS), which can be carried out in the absence of the customer. To improve the system’s overall performance, after providing the OS, the server can postpone executing the CS to time intervals in which the system is empty of customers. The prepared OSs are stored in a designated storage facility. Once the system becomes empty, the server executes the CS for the stored OSs, one at a time. We consider two unbounded dimensions system involving a multivariate probability generating function and derive closed-form expressions for the system’s steady-state probabilities and its various performance measures. An economic analysis compares the described model with a corresponding limited OS capacity model.

On the search of an optimal tie-breaking system for sport competitions with a large number of participants

Time: 18:10

Joep Freixas (Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya)

We propose a simple method of undoing tiebreaks in sport competitions with a large number of competitors and relatively small number of rounds of competition. Such methods are common in many games including Chess, Go, Bridge or Scrabble, among others.Strength of schedule is the idea behind the methods based on the games already played: that the player that played the harder competition to achieve the same number of points should be ranked higher.Tie-breaking methods decide in strict order the prizes to be received. One of the most commonly used methods is the well-known Buchholz method, based on the arithmetic mean of the scores obtained by the opponents. The alternative method that we propose in this paper, which is quite close (in statistical terms) to the median of the scores obtained by the opponents, is also a weighted average of the opponents’ scores, whose weights are based on the binomial distribution. The main objective of the article is to compare the proposed method with that of Buchholz, highlighting the many advantages over it.Unfortunately, even today Buchholz’s method and its variants are routinely used as the first and second tiebreaker criteria. It is the used as a first and second criteria in the rapid and blitz chess world championships that took place in December 2021. We believe that Buchholz’s method should be replaced by the one proposed here as soon as possible.