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Record W7117304551 · doi:10.1287/mnsc.2021.04075

Potty Parity

2025· article· en· W7117304551 on OpenAlex

Why this work is in the frame

A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.

affAt least one author lists a Canadian institution in the pinned OpenAlex snapshot.
aboutThe title or abstract carries a Canadian signal from the geographic lexicon.

Bibliographic record

VenueManagement Science · 2025
Typearticle
Languageen
FieldComputer Science
TopicSpreadsheets and End-User Computing
Canadian institutionsUniversity of TorontoMcGill University
Fundersnot available
KeywordsCounterintuitivePoolingFlexibility (engineering)Distributive propertyPopulationPareto principle

Abstract

fetched live from OpenAlex

We address the issues of unequal restroom access for women and LGBTQ+ individuals, known as the potty parity problem. We propose a utility model in which users consider gender identity, wait time, and safety concerns when choosing restrooms. We evaluate different layouts’ efficiency measured by the total utilities (as in the utilitarian principle) and assess their fairness using the measures of the minimum utility gain (as in the Rawlsian fairness) and the gap between maximum and minimum gains (as in the distributive fairness). When the population is sensitive to gender identity and safety concerns, although it may initially seem intuitive to assume that converting all restrooms to unisex facilities would be efficient and fair due to the pooling of servers and increased flexibility and perceived fairness due to all users standing in the same line, our findings demonstrate that this design can be neither efficient nor fair. In contrast, we show that converting some men’s restrooms to unisex can enhance both efficiency and fairness of access. This highlights that a moderate level of flexibility can outperform a fully flexible system. Moreover, conventional wisdom suggests that removing a restroom unit from the men’s room would negatively impact users from the men’s side. However, our analysis reveals a counterintuitive insight that such a change can lead to a Pareto improvement, benefiting all users involved. We also analytically explore additional benefits of unisex restrooms under different user behaviors and situations and present practically relevant numerical results to support our findings. This paper was accepted by Elena Katok, operations management. Funding: This work was supported by the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada [Grant RGPIN-2021-04295]. Supplemental Material: The online appendices and data files are available at https://doi.org/10.1287/mnsc.2021.04075 .

Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.

Full frame distilled prediction

Teacher imitation

Not calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.

metaresearch head score (Codex)0.001
metaresearch head score (Gemma)0.000
Version: codex-gemma-dda1882f352aValidation status: machine_predicted_unvalidated
Candidate categoriesnone
Consensus categoriesnone
DomainCandidate signal: none · Consensus signal: none
Study designCandidate signal: Theoretical or conceptual · Consensus signal: none
GenreCandidate signal: Empirical · Consensus signal: none
Teacher disagreement score0.929
Threshold uncertainty score0.487

Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category

CategoryCodexGemma
Metaresearch0.0010.000
Meta-epidemiology (narrow)0.0000.000
Meta-epidemiology (broad)0.0000.000
Bibliometrics0.0000.002
Science and technology studies0.0000.000
Scholarly communication0.0010.001
Open science0.0020.002
Research integrity0.0000.000
Insufficient payload (model declined to judge)0.0000.000

Machine scores (provisional)

The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.

Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.

Opus teacher head0.010
GPT teacher head0.259
Teacher spread0.248 · how far apart the two teachers sit on this one work
Validation statusscore_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it