Equilibrium Means Equity? An E-CARGO Perspective on the Golden Mean Principle

In the team allocation problem (TAP), eliminating team disparities aims at keeping an equilibrium of the resource or ability among teams for equality. For this concern, existing literature merely utilized the golden mean principle to eliminate team disparities from a static perspective. Few of them reasonably investigate the pros and cons of this principle from a computational perspective. Moreover, maintaining equilibrium is a dynamic process and requires dynamic adjustment, especially after considering team members’ self-efforts and adaptivity. With respect to the environments—classes, agents, roles, groups, and objects (E-CARGO) model and its role-based collaboration (RBC) methodology, this article formalizes and solves the TAP, i.e., revised group role assignment (GRA) problem, from both the individual and team’s perspective. Based on the revised GRA, this article provides novel insight into the effectiveness of dynamically maintaining equilibrium, which may help decision-makers be proactive in building more sustainable teams. Relevant large-scale simulation experiments are conducted in this article to verify the proposed method. This article reveals a social paradox: even though considering all about the team members’ self-efforts and adaptivity, equilibrium still seems inequitable. Conversely, pursuing equilibrium may bring the Matthew effect.