Activity: Talk/lecture or presentation › Presentation
Description
We study within-division case allocation: when a case is directed to a specific court division, it must then be assigned to a judge. Cases arrive online, vary in complexity, type, and other process-relevant attributes, and judges are scarce resources with changing workloads. We seek an online assignment mechanism that assigns each new case to the appropriate judge upon arrival. The primary objective is to maximize adjudication “quality," a system-wide measure that evaluates efficiency (timeliness/throughput) and reliability proxies, without assessing individual judges. Fairness is a soft objective aligned with institutional standards: as random or rotational assignment is often justified on fairness and judicial independence grounds, we consider the similarity to the uniform distribution induced by random assignment as a baseline. We investigate whether a structured, load-aware matching can improve overall system performance while maintaining sufficient fairness and auditability.