Optimal resource allocation in survey designs

Resource allocation is a relatively new research area in survey designs and has not been fully addressed in the literature. Recently, the declining participation rates and increasing survey costs have steered research interests towards resource planning. Survey organizations across the world are considering the development of new mathematical models in order to improve the quality of survey results while taking into account optimal resource planning. In this paper, we address the problem of resource allocation in survey designs and we discuss its impact on the quality of the survey results. We propose a novel method in which the optimal allocation of survey resources is determined such that the quality of survey results, i.e., the survey response rate, is maximized. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our method by extensive numerical experiments.

► Novel formulation of the adaptive survey design as a resource allocation problem. ► This formulation leads to a nonconvex integer nonlinear resource allocation problem. ► We show how the problem can be cast as a Markov decision problem. ► The problem is solved to guaranteed global optimality by dynamic programming. ► Numerical illustration of the algorithm to obtain optimal schedule of survey calls.