We consider fair allocation of $m$ indivisible items to $n$ agents of equal entitlements, with submodular valuation functions. Previously, Seddighin and Seddighin [{\em Artificial Intelligence} 2024] proved the existence of allocations that offer each agent at least a $\frac{1}{c \log n \log\log n}$ fraction of her maximin share (MMS), where $c$ is some large constant (over 1000, in their work). We modify their algorithm and improve its analysis, improving the ratio to $\frac{1}{14 \log n}$.
Some of our improvement stems from tighter analysis of concentration properties for the value of any subadditive valuation function $v$, when considering a set $S' \subseteq S$ of items, where each item of $S$ is included in $S'$ independently at random (with possibly different probabilities). In particular, we prove that up to less than the value of one item, the median value of $v(S')$, denoted by $M$, is at least two-thirds of the expected value, $M \geq \frac{2}{3}\E[v(S')] - \frac{11}{12}\max_{e \in S} v(e)$.
We study fair and economically efficient allocation of indivisible goods among agents whose valuations are rank functions of matroids. Such valuations constitute a well-studied class of submodular functions (i.e., they exhibit a diminishing returns property) and model preferences in several resource-allocation settings. We prove that, for matroid-rank valuations, a social welfare-maximizing allocation that gives each agent her maximin share always exists. Furthermore, such an allocation can be computed in polynomial time. We establish similar existential and algorithmic results for the pairwis…
We study the problem of allocating indivisible goods among agents that have an identical subadditive valuation over the goods. The extent of fairness and efficiency of allocations is measured by the generalized means of the values that the allocations generate among the agents. Parameterized by an exponent term $p$, generalized-mean welfares encompass multiple well-studied objectives, such as social welfare, Nash social welfare, and egalitarian welfare. We establish that, under identical subadditive valuations and in the demand oracle model, one can efficiently find a single allocation that ap…
We develop polynomial-time algorithms for the fair and efficient allocation of indivisible goods among $n$ agents that have subadditive valuations over the goods. We first consider the Nash social welfare as our objective and design a polynomial-time algorithm that, in the value oracle model, finds an $8n$-approximation to the Nash optimal allocation. Subadditive valuations include XOS (fractionally subadditive) and submodular valuations as special cases. Our result, even for the special case of submodular valuations, improves upon the previously best known $O(n \log n)$-approximation ratio of…
We study the problem of allocating a set of indivisible goods among agents with subadditive valuations in a fair and efficient manner. Envy-Freeness up to any good (EFX) is the most compelling notion of fairness in the context of indivisible goods. Although the existence of EFX is not known beyond the simple case of two agents with subadditive valuations, some good approximations of EFX are known to exist, namely $\tfrac{1}{2}$-EFX allocation and EFX allocations with bounded charity. Nash welfare (the geometric mean of agents' valuations) is one of the most commonly used measures of efficiency…
We study the problem of allocating indivisible goods among agents in a fair and economically efficient manner. In this context, the Nash social welfare-defined as the geometric mean of agents' valuations for their assigned bundles-stands as a fundamental measure that quantifies the extent of fairness of an allocation. Focusing on instances in which the agents' valuations have binary marginals, we develop essentially tight results for (approximately) maximizing Nash social welfare under two of the most general classes of complement-free valuations, i.e., under binary XOS and binary subadditive …
Budget feasible mechanism design studies procurement combinatorial auctions where the sellers have private costs to produce items, and the buyer(auctioneer) aims to maximize a social valuation function on subsets of items, under the budget constraint on the total payment. One of the most important questions in the field is "which valuation domains admit truthful budget feasible mechanisms with `small' approximations (compared to the social optimum)?" Singer showed that additive and submodular functions have such constant approximations. Recently, Dobzinski, Papadimitriou, and Singer gave an O(…
We consider the problem of allocating indivisible goods fairly among n agents who have additive and submodular valuations for the goods. Our fairness guarantees are in terms of the maximin share, that is defined to be the maximum value that an agent can ensure for herself, if she were to partition the goods into n bundles, and then receive a minimum valued bundle. Since maximin fair allocations (i.e., allocations in which each agent gets at least her maximin share) do not always exist, prior work has focused on approximation results that aim to find allocations in which the value of the bundle…
We study envy-free allocations of indivisible goods to agents in settings where each agent is unaware of the goods allocated to other agents. In particular, we propose the maximin aware (MMA) fairness measure, which guarantees that every agent, given the bundle allocated to her, is aware that she does not envy at least one other agent, even if she does not know how the other goods are distributed among other agents. We also introduce two of its relaxations and discuss their egalitarian guarantee and existence. Finally, we present a polynomial-time algorithm, which computes an allocation that a…
We study the revenue maximization problem of a seller with n heterogeneous items for sale to a single buyer whose valuation function for sets of items is unknown and drawn from some distribution D. We show that if D is a distribution over subadditive valuations with independent items, then the better of pricing each item separately or pricing only the grand bundle achieves a constant-factor approximation to the revenue of the optimal mechanism. This includes buyers who are k-demand, additive up to a matroid constraint, or additive up to constraints of any downwards-closed set system (and whose…
The class of gross substitutes (GS) set functions plays a central role in Economics and Computer Science. GS belongs to the hierarchy of {\em complement free} valuations introduced by Lehmann, Lehmann and Nisan, along with other prominent classes: $GS \subsetneq Submodular \subsetneq XOS \subsetneq Subadditive$. The GS class has always been more enigmatic than its counterpart classes, both in its definition and in its relation to the other classes. For example, while it is well understood how closely the Submodular, XOS and Subadditive classes (point-wise) approximate one another, approximabil…
We study the Price of Anarchy of simultaneous first-price auctions for buyers with submodular and subadditive valuations. The current best upper bounds for the Bayesian Price of Anarchy of these auctions are e/(e-1) [Syrgkanis and Tardos 2013] and 2 [Feldman et al. 2013], respectively. We provide matching lower bounds for both cases even for the case of full information and for mixed Nash equilibria via an explicit construction. We present an alternative proof of the upper bound of e/(e-1) for first-price auctions with fractionally subadditive valuations which reveals the worst-case price dist…
We study the problem of allocating indivisible goods among strategic agents. We focus on settings wherein monetary transfers are not available and each agent's private valuation is a submodular function with binary marginals, i.e., the agents' valuations are matroid-rank functions. In this setup, we establish a notable dichotomy between two of the most well-studied fairness notions in discrete fair division; specifically, between envy-freeness up to one good (EF1) and maximin shares (MMS). First, we show that a Pareto-efficient mechanism of Babaioff et al. (2021) is group strategy-proof for fi…
Prophet inequalities compare the expected performance of an online algorithm for a stochastic optimization problem to the expected optimal solution in hindsight. They are a major alternative to classic worst-case competitive analysis, of particular importance in the design and analysis of simple (posted-price) incentive compatible mechanisms with provable approximation guarantees. A central open problem in this area concerns subadditive combinatorial auctions. Here $n$ agents with subadditive valuation functions compete for the assignment of $m$ items. The goal is to find an allocation of the …
We consider the problem of approximate maximin share (MMS) allocation of indivisible items among three agents with additive valuation functions. For goods, we show that an $\frac{11}{12}$ - MMS allocation always exists, improving over the previously known bound of $\frac{8}{9}$ . Moreover, in our allocation, we can prespecify an agent that is to receive her full proportional share (PS); we also present examples showing that for such allocations the ratio of $\frac{11}{12}$ is best possible. For chores, we show that a $\frac{19}{18}$-MMS allocation always exists. Also in this case, we can presp…
We study combinatorial auctions where each item is sold separately but simultaneously via a second price auction. We ask whether it is possible to efficiently compute in this game a pure Nash equilibrium with social welfare close to the optimal one. We show that when the valuations of the bidders are submodular, in many interesting settings (e.g., constant number of bidders, budget additive bidders) computing an equilibrium with good welfare is essentially as easy as computing, completely ignoring incentives issues, an allocation with good welfare. On the other hand, for subadditive valuations…
We provide simple and approximately revenue-optimal mechanisms in the multi-item multi-bidder settings. We unify and improve all previous results, as well as generalize the results to broader cases. In particular, we prove that the better of the following two simple, deterministic and Dominant Strategy Incentive Compatible mechanisms, a sequential posted price mechanism or an anonymous sequential posted price mechanism with entry fee, achieves a constant fraction of the optimal revenue among all randomized, Bayesian Incentive Compatible mechanisms, when buyers' valuations are XOS over independ…
We introduce draft auctions, which is a sequential auction format where at each iteration players bid for the right to buy items at a fixed price. We show that draft auctions offer an exponential improvement in social welfare at equilibrium over sequential item auctions where predetermined items are auctioned at each time step. Specifically, we show that for any subadditive valuation the social welfare at equilibrium is an $O(\log^2(m))$-approximation to the optimal social welfare, where $m$ is the number of items. We also provide tighter approximation results for several subclasses. Our welfa…
We consider the problem of fair allocation of indivisible goods to agents with submodular valuation functions, where agents may have either equal entitlements or arbitrary (possibly unequal) entitlements. We focus on share-based fairness notions, specifically, the maximin share (MMS) for equal entitlements and the anyprice share (APS) for arbitrary entitlements, and design allocation algorithms that give each agent a bundle of value at least some constant fraction of her share value. For the equal entitlement case (and submodular valuations), Ghodsi, Hajiaghayi, Seddighin, Seddighin, and Yami …
We consider {\em profit-maximization} problems for {\em combinatorial auctions} with {\em non-single minded valuation functions} and {\em limited supply}. We obtain fairly general results that relate the approximability of the profit-maximization problem to that of the corresponding {\em social-welfare-maximization} (SWM) problem, which is the problem of finding an allocation $(S_1,\ldots,S_n)$ satisfying the capacity constraints that has maximum total value $\sum_j v_j(S_j)$. For {\em subadditive valuations} (and hence {\em submodular, XOS valuations}), we obtain a solution with profit $\OPT_…
In fair division of indivisible goods, $\ell$-out-of-$d$ maximin share (MMS) is the value that an agent can guarantee by partitioning the goods into $d$ bundles and choosing the $\ell$ least preferred bundles. Most existing works aim to guarantee to all agents a constant fraction of their 1-out-of-$n$ MMS. But this guarantee is sensitive to small perturbation in agents' cardinal valuations. We consider a more robust approximation notion, which depends only on the agents' \emph{ordinal} rankings of bundles. We prove the existence of $\ell$-out-of-$\lfloor(\ell+\frac{1}{2})n\rfloor$ MMS allocati…
Simultaneous Ordinal Maximin Share and Envy-Based Guarantees
Max Planck Institute for Informatics（马克斯·普朗克 informatics 研究所）；Universität des Saarlandes（萨尔兰州立大学）；Hertz Chair for Algorithms and Optimization, University of Bonn（波恩大学赫兹算法与优化讲席）；University of Bonn（波恩大学）
We study the communication complexity of welfare maximization in combinatorial auctions with $m$ items and two subadditive bidders. A $\frac{1}{2}$-approximation can be guaranteed by a trivial randomized protocol with zero communication, or a trivial deterministic protocol with $O(1)$ communication. We show that outperforming these trivial protocols requires exponential communication, settling an open question of [DobzinskiNS10, Feige09]. Specifically, we show that any (randomized) protocol guaranteeing a $(\frac{1}{2}+\frac{6}{\log_2 m})$-approximation requires communication exponential in $m…
We study the problem of fairly allocating a set of indivisible items to a set of agents with additive valuations. Recently, Feige et al. (WINE'21) proved that a maximin share (MMS) allocation exists for all instances with $n$ agents and no more than $n + 5$ items. Moreover, they proved that an MMS allocation is not guaranteed to exist for instances with $3$ agents and at least $9$ items, or $n \ge 4$ agents and at least $3n + 3$ items. In this work, we shrink the gap between these upper and lower bounds for guaranteed existence of MMS allocations. We prove that for any integer $c > 0$, there e…
Indian Institute of Science（印度科学理工学院）；Chennai Mathematical Institute（金奈数学研究所）
We study the problem of allocating indivisible goods among n agents in a fair manner. For this problem, maximin share (MMS) is a well-studied solution concept which provides a fairness threshold. Specifically, maximin share is defined as the minimum utility that an agent can guarantee for herself when asked to partition the set of goods into n bundles such that the remaining (n-1) agents pick their bundles adversarially. An allocation is deemed to be fair if every agent gets a bundle whose valuation is at least her maximin share. Even though maximin shares provide a natural benchmark for fairn…
