CAREER: Efficient and Equitable Housing Allocation

这个教师早期职业发展（Career）奖将通过支持研究公平有效地分配经济适用房的技术，为促进国家繁荣和经济福利做出贡献。它通过创新的政策来解决无家可归和住房负担能力的持续挑战，以(i)增加住房券的利用率，并确保更多的高障碍家庭从住房券中受益，（ii）在减少行政开销的同时提高住房券等待名单的移动速度，（iii）减少在获得快速重新安置支持后重返无家可归的家庭数量。（iv）确保新出租单位的分配，为不同的申请人提供机会。教育和推广计划包括与从业人员合作，通过博客和YouTube频道传播思想，以及公开分享新课程的创新材料和活动。实现这些研究目标需要克服两个研究障碍。首先，住房援助计划通常有多个目标，这些目标不同于广泛考虑的目标，如收入或吞吐量最大化。第二，许多政策的长期后果与其短期效果背道而驰。该项目将开发动态模型，以捕捉当前决策对系统未来演变的影响，制定合适的目标，并建议和分析实现这些目标的新政策。该项目将扩展库存管理、动态匹配、排队和优化的概念，考虑动态匹配问题，其中当前的决策影响未来的到达，以及未知分布的随机前置时间的库存管理问题。该奖项反映了美国国家科学基金会的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的知识价值和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估，被认为值得支持。

This Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) award will contribute to the advancement of national prosperity and economic welfare by supporting research to study techniques to allocate affordable housing equitably and efficiently. It addresses ongoing challenges of homelessness and housing affordability with innovative policies to (i) increase housing voucher utilization and ensure that more high-barrier households benefit from housing vouchers, (ii) increase the rate at which voucher waiting lists move while reducing administrative overhead, (iii) reduce the number of households that return to homelessness after receiving rapid rehousing support, and (iv) ensure that the allocation of new rental units offers opportunities to a diverse set of applicants. The education and outreach plan includes collaboration with practitioners, dissemination of ideas through a blog and YouTube channel, and publicly sharing innovative materials and activities from a new course.Achieving these research goals will require overcoming two research hurdles. The first is that housing assistance programs often have multiple objectives that differ from widely considered goals such as revenue or throughput maximization. The second is that many policies have long-run consequences which run counter to their short-term effects. This project will develop dynamic models to capture the effects of current decisions on the future evolution of the system, formulate suitable objectives, and recommend and analyze novel policies to achieve these objectives. The project will extend concepts from inventory management, dynamic matching, queueing, and optimization by considering dynamic matching problems in which current decisions influence future arrivals, and inventory management problems with stochastic lead time from unknown distributions.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.