OxTalks will soon move to the new Halo platform and will become 'Oxford Events.' There will be a need for an OxTalks freeze. This was previously planned for Friday 14th November – a new date will be shared as soon as it is available (full details will be available on the Staff Gateway).
In the meantime, the OxTalks site will remain active and events will continue to be published.
If staff have any questions about the Oxford Events launch, please contact halo@digital.ox.ac.uk
Reserve systems allow combining competing objectives to allocate scarce resources based on priority. For example, schools may reserve some seats for students from underprivileged backgrounds or hospitals may reserve some ventilators for frontline healthcare workers. An important determinant of the outcome is the order in which reserve categories are processed: categories processed later generally matter more than those processed earlier. The reason is that an agent who qualifies for multiple categories counts towards the quota of whichever category is processed first. I propose a new solution that processes reserve categories simultaneously so that if an agent qualifies for n categories, she takes 1/n units from each of them. That approach treats categories symmetrically and offers greater transparency: the relative importance of categories is entirely captured by the size of their quotas.
