From Efficiency to Fairness: Design of Allocation Rules for Food Bank Operations

Food banks play an essential role in alleviating world hunger by allocating surplus food to eligible agencies or individuals. As non-profit organizations, food banks target agencies to achieve operational efficiency of food allocation (i.e., reduce food waste). However, this would result in inequitable service delivered to different agencies. In this work, we design real-time food allocation rules to serve the sequentially revealed demand of each targeted agency, and to ensure that adequate food is allocated to each agency (fairness) as much as possible. We measure allocation fairness by fill rate (i.e., the ratio of the allocated amount to revealed demand) and exploit online convex optimization tools to characterize the attainable fill rate of the agency. We use these insights to develop provably near-optimal allocation rules for food bank operations, and leverage on extensive numerical simulations to discuss the promising benefits of our allocation rules over the existing benchmark.