تخصیص منابع ناملموس: فرآیند تحلیل سلسله مراتبی و برنامه ریزی خطی

An intangible is an attribute that has no scale of measurement. Intangibles such as effort and skill arise in conjunction with resource allocation but are not usually included directly in a mathematical model because of the absence of a unit of measurement. However, intangibles can be quantified through relative measurement (priorities). Intangible resource allocation uses these priorities along with normalized measures of tangibles (when present) in a linear programming model with coefficients and variables measured in relative terms. The priorities of tangible resources from the optimal solution can then be used to assign monetary values to priorities of any intangible resources.

Intangible resources such as quality, care, attention, and intelligence are often needed to develop a plan, design a system or solve a problem. Thus far, resource allocation models have not dealt with intangibles directly, but rather by assigning them worth in terms of such phenomena as time and money. Our goal in this paper is to show that, although there is no direct scale of measurement for an intangible, it can be measured in relative terms together with tangibles. A ratio scale of priorities can thus be derived for both. These priorities serve as coefficients in an optimization framework to derive relative amounts of resources to be allocated. For intangible resources, because there is no unit of measurement, no absolute amount of a resource can be specified. However, in the presence of tangibles, it becomes possible to compute their absolute equivalents because of the proportionality inherent in their priorities. Our concern with the measurement of intangibles relates to the value of assets owned by corporations. While one may argue that the market value of a company, including its intangible resources, is concretely calculated from its tangible assets, intangibles become particularly significant when, for example, two companies merge, and synergy gives rise to new intangibles with potential positive and negative impacts on the value of the combined company. Measuring such intangibles could help assess the wisdom of a merger. An example given later in the paper illustrates this point.

This paper has the potential to dramatically change the process of resource allocation in economics. Budget allocations can now be made not just in terms of monetary returns and time and labor costs, but also in terms of social welfare such as satisfaction, stability, and longevity. Defense spending can be tied to threats and their priorities with their economic equivalents identified. One may even dare to evaluate human life not simply in terms of economic productivity over the years, but also as to the potential to make social and intellectual contributions. This of course can become a double-edged sword that could be used to discount the value of people, but one would hope that integrity and caution would prevent such abuses. We have shown that any current LP resource allocation model using ratio scale measurements for its coefficients can be transformed into an equivalent model whose coefficients belong to relative ratio scales. We also showed that as intangibles can be measured in relative terms, they can be included as constraints in an LP model. If more than a single tangible resource is involved, this approach makes it possible to find the priority equivalent of a unit of an intangible resource in terms of all the measurable ones. By including intangibles, the effectiveness of allocation should give us greater freedom to deal with aspects of decision problems that are now completely left out of our quantitative models.