When allocating indivisible resources or tasks, an envy-free allocation or equitable allocation may not exist. We present a sufficient condition and an algorithm to achieve envy-freeness and equitability when monetary transfers are allowed. The approach works for any agent valuation functions (positive or negative) as long as they satisfy superadditivity. For the case of additive utilities, we present a characterization of allocations that can simultaneously be made equitable and envy-free via payments.
In fair division, equitability dictates that each participant receives the same level of utility. In this work, we study equitable allocations of indivisible goods among agents with additive valuations. While prior work has studied (approximate) equitability in isolation, we consider equitability in conjunction with other well-studied notions of fairness and economic efficiency. We show that the Leximin algorithm produces an allocation that satisfies equitability up to any good and Pareto optimality. We also give a novel algorithm that guarantees Pareto optimality and equitability up to one go…
In this paper, we study the classic problem of fairly allocating indivisible items with the extra feature that the items lie on a line. Our goal is to find a fair allocation that is contiguous, meaning that the bundle of each agent forms a contiguous block on the line. While allocations satisfying the classical fairness notions of proportionality, envy-freeness, and equitability are not guaranteed to exist even without the contiguity requirement, we show the existence of contiguous allocations satisfying approximate versions of these notions that do not degrade as the number of agents or items…
Multi-unit auctions are a paradigmatic model, where a seller brings multiple units of a good, while several buyers bring monetary endowments. It is well known that Walrasian equilibria do not always exist in this model, however compelling relaxations such as (Walrasian) envy-free pricing do. In this paper we design an optimal envy-free mechanism for multi-unit auctions with budgets. When the market is even mildly competitive, the approximation ratios of this mechanism are small constants for both the revenue and welfare objectives, and in fact for welfare the approximation converges to 1 as th…
We investigate the efficiency of fair allocations of indivisible goods using the well-studied price of fairness concept. Previous work has focused on classical fairness notions such as envy-freeness, proportionality, and equitability. However, these notions cannot always be satisfied for indivisible goods, leading to certain instances being ignored in the analysis. In this paper, we focus instead on notions with guaranteed existence, including envy-freeness up to one good (EF1), balancedness, maximum Nash welfare (MNW), and leximin. We also introduce the concept of strong price of fairness, wh…
We study fair resource allocation under a connectedness constraint wherein a set of indivisible items are arranged on a path and only connected subsets of items may be allocated to the agents. An allocation is deemed fair if it satisfies equitability up to one good (EQ1), which requires that agents' utilities are approximately equal. We show that achieving EQ1 in conjunction with well-studied measures of economic efficiency (such as Pareto optimality, non-wastefulness, maximum egalitarian or utilitarian welfare) is computationally hard even for binary additive valuations. On the algorithmic si…
Allocating Indivisible Goods to Strategic Agents: Pure Nash Equilibria and Fairness
School of Mathematics, Statistics and Actuarial Science, University of Essex（埃塞克斯大学数学、统计与精算科学学院）；Archimedes/Athena RC（阿基米德/雅典娜研究中心）；Department of Computer Science, University of Liverpool（利物浦大学计算机科学系）；Department of Computer, Control, and Management Engineering, Sapienza University of Rome（罗马大学计算机、控制与管理工程系）；Input Output Global (IOG)（输入输出全球公司）；Institute for Logic, Language and Computation, University of Amsterdam（阿姆斯特丹大学逻辑、语言与计算研究所）
