Fair Allocation of Indivisible Goods to Asymmetric Agents

DOI10.1613/JAIR.1.11291MaRDI QIDQ4611397zbMATH OpenOpenAlexWikidataFDO

Authors Alireza Farhadi, Mohammad Ghodsi, Sébastien Lahaie, David M. Pennock, Masoud Seddighin, S. Seddighin, Hadi Yami, Mohammad T. Hajiaghayi

Publication date 18 January 2019

Published in Journal of Artificial Intelligence Research (Search for Journal in Brave)

Full work available at URL https://arxiv.org/abs/1703.01649

zbMATH Keywords

fair allocation of indivisible goodsagents with unequal entitlementsstochastic agentsstochastic items

Mathematics Subject Classification ID

Resource and cost allocation (including fair division, apportionment, etc.) (91B32) Stochastic models in economics (91B70)

Abstract: We study fair allocation of indivisible goods to agents with unequal entitlements. Fair allocation has been the subject of many studies in both divisible and indivisible settings. Our emphasis is on the case where the goods are indivisible and agents have unequal entitlements. This problem is a generalization of the work by Procaccia and Wang wherein the agents are assumed to be symmetric with respect to their entitlements. Although Procaccia and Wang show an almost fair (constant approximation) allocation exists in their setting, our main result is in sharp contrast to their observation. We show that, in some cases with $n$ agents, no allocation can guarantee better than $1/n$ approximation of a fair allocation when the entitlements are not necessarily equal. Furthermore, we devise a simple algorithm that ensures a $1/n$ approximation guarantee. Our second result is for a restricted version of the problem where the valuation of every agent for each good is bounded by the total value he wishes to receive in a fair allocation. Although this assumption might seem w.l.o.g, we show it enables us to find a $1/2$ approximation fair allocation via a greedy algorithm. Finally, we run some experiments on real-world data and show that, in practice, a fair allocation is likely to exist. We also support our experiments by showing positive results for two stochastic variants of the problem, namely stochastic agents and stochastic items.

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Cited in

(24)

• A Little Charity Guarantees Almost Envy-Freeness
• Maximin share guarantee for goods with positive externalities
• Almost proportional allocations of indivisible chores: computation, approximation and efficiency
• The price of fairness for indivisible goods
• Asymptotic existence of proportionally fair allocations
• Weighted fair division of indivisible items: a review
• The fair division of hereditary set systems
• An improved approximation algorithm for maximin shares
• Competitive equilibrium with indivisible goods and generic budgets
• Closing gaps in asymptotic fair division
• Fair division with two-sided preferences
• Almost envy-freeness for groups: improved bounds via discrepancy theory
• Fair Allocation of Indivisible Goods
• Weighted fair division with matroid-rank valuations: monotonicity and strategyproofness
• Picking sequences and monotonicity in weighted fair division
• Approximate maximin shares for groups of agents
• On maximum weighted Nash welfare for binary valuations
• Fair division of indivisible goods: recent progress and open questions
• Fairly allocating many goods with few queries
• FAIR ALLOCATION BASED ON TWO CRITERIA : A DEA GAME VIEW OF "ADD THEM UP AND DIVIDE BY TWO"(<Special Issue>Operations Research for Performance Evaluation)
• Fairness in temporal slot assignment
• Communication complexity of discrete fair division
• A polynomial-time algorithm for computing a Pareto optimal and almost proportional allocation
• Mind the gap: cake cutting with separation

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