The Price of Opportunity Fairness in Matroid Allocation Problems

Fuente: arXiv
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Hauptverfasser: Castera, Rémi, Garrido-Lucero, Felipe, Loiseau, Patrick, Mauras, Simon, Molina, Mathieu, Perchet, Vianney
Format: Preprint
Veröffentlicht: 2024
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author Castera, Rémi
Garrido-Lucero, Felipe
Loiseau, Patrick
Mauras, Simon
Molina, Mathieu
Perchet, Vianney
author_facet Castera, Rémi
Garrido-Lucero, Felipe
Loiseau, Patrick
Mauras, Simon
Molina, Mathieu
Perchet, Vianney
contents We consider matroid allocation problems under opportunity fairness constraints: resources need to be allocated to a set of agents under matroid constraints (which include classical problems such as bipartite matching). Agents are divided into $C$ groups according to a sensitive attribute, and an allocation is opportunity-fair if each group receives the same share proportional to the maximum feasible allocation it could achieve in isolation. We study the Price of Fairness (PoF), i.e., the ratio between maximum size allocations and maximum size opportunity-fair allocations. We first provide a characterization of the PoF leveraging the underlying polymatroid structure of the allocation problem. Based on this characterization, we prove bounds on the PoF in various settings from fully adversarial (worst-case) to fully random. Notably, one of our main results considers an arbitrary matroid structure with agents randomly divided into groups. In this setting, we prove a PoF bound as a function of the (relative) size of the largest group. Our result implies that, as long as there is no dominant group (i.e., the largest group is not too large), opportunity fairness constraints do not induce any loss of social welfare (defined as the allocation size). Overall, our results give insights into which aspects of the problem's structure affect the trade-off between opportunity fairness and social welfare.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2403_00397
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle The Price of Opportunity Fairness in Matroid Allocation Problems
Castera, Rémi
Garrido-Lucero, Felipe
Loiseau, Patrick
Mauras, Simon
Molina, Mathieu
Perchet, Vianney
Computer Science and Game Theory
We consider matroid allocation problems under opportunity fairness constraints: resources need to be allocated to a set of agents under matroid constraints (which include classical problems such as bipartite matching). Agents are divided into $C$ groups according to a sensitive attribute, and an allocation is opportunity-fair if each group receives the same share proportional to the maximum feasible allocation it could achieve in isolation. We study the Price of Fairness (PoF), i.e., the ratio between maximum size allocations and maximum size opportunity-fair allocations. We first provide a characterization of the PoF leveraging the underlying polymatroid structure of the allocation problem. Based on this characterization, we prove bounds on the PoF in various settings from fully adversarial (worst-case) to fully random. Notably, one of our main results considers an arbitrary matroid structure with agents randomly divided into groups. In this setting, we prove a PoF bound as a function of the (relative) size of the largest group. Our result implies that, as long as there is no dominant group (i.e., the largest group is not too large), opportunity fairness constraints do not induce any loss of social welfare (defined as the allocation size). Overall, our results give insights into which aspects of the problem's structure affect the trade-off between opportunity fairness and social welfare.
title The Price of Opportunity Fairness in Matroid Allocation Problems
topic Computer Science and Game Theory
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2403.00397