Response to Mingers and O'Brien

Baker and Benn’s paper describes an interesting practical application of an allocation heuristic. They are wrong, however, when they state that this problem has not attracted the attention of researchers, as there are several papers dealing with such situations. Mingers and O’Brien addressed an almost identical problem in assigning university students to work groups in an equitable way—they termed this the ‘equitable partitioning problem’. The only difference is that Baker and Benn have the additional constraint of respecting prior friendship groups. We will incorporate this in our own algorithm and report on comparative results in the future. Other research in this area includes Beheshtian-Ardekani and Mahmood, Miyaji et al, Muller, Donohue and Fox, Weitz and Lakshminarayanan.