Online Fair Allocation of Perishable Resources

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Banerjee, Siddhartha, Hssaine, Chamsi, Sinclair, Sean R.
Format: Preprint
Published: 2024
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author Banerjee, Siddhartha
Hssaine, Chamsi
Sinclair, Sean R.
author_facet Banerjee, Siddhartha
Hssaine, Chamsi
Sinclair, Sean R.
contents We consider a practically motivated variant of the canonical online fair allocation problem: a decision-maker has a budget of perishable resources to allocate over a fixed number of rounds. Each round sees a random number of arrivals, and the decision-maker must commit to an allocation for these individuals before moving on to the next round. The goal is to construct a sequence of allocations that is envy-free and efficient. Our work makes two important contributions toward this problem: we first derive strong lower bounds on the optimal envy-efficiency trade-off, demonstrating that a decision-maker is fundamentally limited in what she can hope to achieve relative to the no-perishing setting; we then design an algorithm achieving these lower bounds which takes as input (i) a prediction of the perishing order, and (ii) a desired bound on envy. Given the remaining budget in each period, the algorithm uses forecasts of future demand perishing to adaptively choose from one of two carefully constructed guardrail quantities. We demonstrate our algorithm's strong numerical performance, and state-of-the-art, perishing-agnostic algorithms' inefficacy, on simulations calibrated to a real-world dataset.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2406_02402
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Online Fair Allocation of Perishable Resources
Banerjee, Siddhartha
Hssaine, Chamsi
Sinclair, Sean R.
Optimization and Control
Computer Science and Game Theory
Machine Learning
91B32
We consider a practically motivated variant of the canonical online fair allocation problem: a decision-maker has a budget of perishable resources to allocate over a fixed number of rounds. Each round sees a random number of arrivals, and the decision-maker must commit to an allocation for these individuals before moving on to the next round. The goal is to construct a sequence of allocations that is envy-free and efficient. Our work makes two important contributions toward this problem: we first derive strong lower bounds on the optimal envy-efficiency trade-off, demonstrating that a decision-maker is fundamentally limited in what she can hope to achieve relative to the no-perishing setting; we then design an algorithm achieving these lower bounds which takes as input (i) a prediction of the perishing order, and (ii) a desired bound on envy. Given the remaining budget in each period, the algorithm uses forecasts of future demand perishing to adaptively choose from one of two carefully constructed guardrail quantities. We demonstrate our algorithm's strong numerical performance, and state-of-the-art, perishing-agnostic algorithms' inefficacy, on simulations calibrated to a real-world dataset.
title Online Fair Allocation of Perishable Resources
topic Optimization and Control
Computer Science and Game Theory
Machine Learning
91B32
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2406.02402