{"about":{"site":"https://codewithpapers.app","non_affiliation":"Code with Papers and Syntology are not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by Papers with Code, Meta, or the pwc-archive mirror.","licence":"CC BY-SA 4.0","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","attribution":"https://codewithpapers.app/attribution","modified":"archive material modified by Syntology; see the attribution page"},"url":"/paper/redesigning-service-level-agreements-equity","title":"Redesigning Service Level Agreements: Equity and Efficiency in City Government Operations","arxiv_id":"2410.14825","date":"2024-10-18","proceeding":null,"authors":["Zhi Liu","Nikhil Garg"],"abstract":"We study how government should allocate resources (e.g., maintenance of public infrastructure) over time, efficiently and equitably -- when these desiderata may conflict. In particular, we consider the design of Service Level Agreements (SLAs) 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 queueing framework; the city has two decision levers: how to allocate response budgets to different neighborhoods, and how to schedule responses to individual incidents. We first theoretically analyze a stylized model, deriving when the equity-efficiency trade-off is substantial in absolute terms and centralizing response efforts leads to relatively smaller improvements over optimal decentralized operations. We then develop a simulation-optimization framework to design and analyze policies in practice. Applying our framework to data from NYC, we find: (a) in practice, despite large potential trade-offs, equity improvements are possible with relatively small decreases in efficiency; (b) there exist policies that are both more efficient and equitable than status quo inspections; (c) the gain from centralization is {relatively small compared to the potential efficiency-equity tradeoff}. Our results provide widely applicable predictions about the scale of the equity-efficiency trade-off in similar resource allocation settings, and our data-driven simulation-optimization framework enables specific policy recommendations in government operations. Our code is available at https://github.com/nikhgarg/sla_design. Our theoretical statements have been formalized in Lean, available at https://github.com/nikhgarg/AppliedModelingLib/blob/main/papers/LG24ServiceLevelAgreements/.","url_abs":"https://arxiv.org/abs/2410.14825v1","url_pdf":"https://arxiv.org/pdf/2410.14825v1.pdf","source":{"archive":"pwc-archive (Hugging Face), CC BY-SA 4.0","snapshot":"2025-07-28","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","row_kind":"links_only","authors_date_abstract":"arXiv metadata, CC0 1.0 (https://info.arxiv.org/help/license), from the Kaggle arXiv metadata snapshot of 2026-09-12"},"code_links":[{"paper_slug":"redesigning-service-level-agreements-equity","repo_url":"https://github.com/zhiliu724/sla_design","is_official":1,"mentioned_in_paper":1,"mentioned_in_github":0,"framework":"pytorch","reach":{"status":"ok"}}],"tasks":[],"methods":[],"datasets_introduced":[],"methods_introduced":[],"results":[],"syntology":{"syntology_url":null,"atlas_url":"https://app.syntology.ai/?focus=2410.14825","mcp":{"get_harvested_code_for_paper":{"arxiv_id":"2410.14825"}},"developers":"https://syntology.ai/developers","read_at":"2026-09-24T18:15:14+00:00","read_at_is":"when the build read Syntology's graph, not when any sample ran","claim":"Per-sample execution status on synthesized fixtures; not a correctness claim about the paper. 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