Redesigning Service Level Agreements: Equity and Efficiency in City Government Operations

TL;DR

This paper proposes a new framework for designing city government service level agreements that balances efficiency and equity, using theoretical analysis and empirical data from NYC to improve resource allocation and response scheduling.

Contribution

It introduces a novel optimization approach for SLA design in city operations, analyzing the equity-efficiency trade-off and demonstrating practical improvements with real data.

Findings

The price of equity is small in realistic settings.

Current city response policies are highly inefficient and inequitable.

Efficient policies tend to be more equitable, with limited trade-offs.

Abstract

We consider government service allocation -- how the government allocates resources (e.g., maintenance of public infrastructure) over time. It is important to make these decisions efficiently and equitably -- though these desiderata may conflict. In particular, we consider the design of Service Level Agreements (SLA) in city government operations: promises that incidents such as potholes and fallen trees will be responded to within a certain time. We model the problem of designing a set of SLAs as an optimization problem with equity and efficiency objectives under a queuing network framework; the city has two decision levers: how to allocate response budgets to different neighborhoods, and how to schedule responses to individual incidents. We: (1) Theoretically analyze a stylized model and find that the "price of equity" is small in realistic settings; (2) Develop a simulation-optimization framework to optimize policies in practice; (3) Apply our framework empirically using data from NYC, finding that: (a) status quo inspections are highly inefficient and inequitable compared to optimal ones, and (b) in practice, the equity-efficiency trade-off is not substantial: generally, inefficient policies are inequitable, and vice versa.