In
economics
Economics () is the social science that studies the production, distribution, and consumption of goods and services.
Economics focuses on the behaviour and interactions of economic agents and how economies work. Microeconomics analyzes ...
, resource allocation is the assignment of available
resources to various uses. In the context of an entire economy, resources can be allocated by various means, such as
markets, or
planning.
In
project management
Project management is the process of leading the work of a team to achieve all project goals within the given constraints. This information is usually described in project documentation, created at the beginning of the development process. T ...
, resource allocation or
resource management is the scheduling of activities and the resources required by those activities while taking into consideration both the resource availability and the project time.
Economics
In
economics
Economics () is the social science that studies the production, distribution, and consumption of goods and services.
Economics focuses on the behaviour and interactions of economic agents and how economies work. Microeconomics analyzes ...
, the field of
public finance
Public finance is the study of the role of the government in the economy. It is the branch of economics that assesses the government revenue and government expenditure of the public authorities and the adjustment of one or the other to achiev ...
deals with three broad areas:
macroeconomic stabilization, the
distribution of income
In economics, income distribution covers how a country's total GDP is distributed amongst its population. Economic theory and economic policy have long seen income and its distribution as a central concern. Unequal distribution of income causes ec ...
and wealth, and the allocation of resources. Much of the study of the allocation of resources is devoted to finding the conditions under which particular mechanisms of resource allocation lead to
Pareto efficient outcomes, in which no party's situation can be improved without hurting that of another party.
Strategic planning
In
strategic planning, resource allocation is a
plan
A plan is typically any diagram or list of steps with details of timing and resources, used to achieve an objective to do something. It is commonly understood as a temporal set of intended actions through which one expects to achieve a goal.
...
for using available
resources
Resource refers to all the materials available in our environment which are technologically accessible, economically feasible and culturally sustainable and help us to satisfy our needs and wants. Resources can broadly be classified upon their av ...
, for example
human resources, especially in the near term, to achieve goals for the future. It is the process of allocating scarce resources among the various
projects or business units.
There are a number of approaches to solving resource allocation problems e.g. resources can be allocated using a manual approach, an algorithmic approach (see below), or a combination of both.
There may be contingency mechanisms such as a priority ranking of items excluded from the plan, showing which items to fund if more resources should become available and a priority ranking of some items included in the plan, showing which items should be sacrificed if total funding must be reduced.
Algorithms
Resource allocation may be decided by using
computer programs applied to a specific domain to automatically and dynamically distribute resources to applicants.
This is especially common in electronic devices dedicated to routing and communication. For example, channel allocation in
wireless
Wireless communication (or just wireless, when the context allows) is the transfer of information between two or more points without the use of an electrical conductor, optical fiber or other continuous guided medium for the transfer. The most ...
communication may be decided by a
base transceiver station
A base transceiver station (BTS) is a piece of equipment that facilitates wireless communication between user equipment (UE) and a network. UEs are devices like mobile phones (handsets), WLL phones, computers with wireless Internet connectivity, ...
using an appropriate
algorithm
In mathematics and computer science, an algorithm () is a finite sequence of rigorous instructions, typically used to solve a class of specific problems or to perform a computation. Algorithms are used as specifications for performing ...
.
One class of resource whereby applicants bid for the best resource(s) according to their balance of "money", as in an
online auction business model
An online auction (also electronic auction, e-auction, virtual auction, or eAuction) is an auction held over the internet and accessed by internet connected devices. Similar to in-person auctions, online auctions come in a variety of types, with d ...
(see also
auction theory
Auction theory is an applied branch of economics which deals with how bidders act in auction markets and researches how the features of auction markets incentivise predictable outcomes. Auction theory is a tool used to inform the design of real-w ...
).
In one paper on
CPU time slice allocation
an auction algorithm is compared to
proportional share scheduling
Proportional Share Scheduling is a type of scheduling that preallocates certain amount of CPU time
CPU time (or process time) is the amount of time for which a central processing unit (CPU) was used for processing instructions of a computer p ...
.
See also
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Corruption
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Fair division
Fair division is the problem in game theory of dividing a set of resources among several people who have an entitlement to them so that each person receives their due share. That problem arises in various real-world settings such as division of inh ...
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References
{{DEFAULTSORT:Resource Allocation
Resources
Strategic management
Schedule (project management)
Economic planning
Public finance
Contexts for auctions