The Cost and Complexity of Minimizing Envy in House Allocation

Fuente: arXiv
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Autori principali: Madathil, Jayakrishnan, Misra, Neeldhara, Sethia, Aditi
Natura: Preprint
Pubblicazione: 2024
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author Madathil, Jayakrishnan
Misra, Neeldhara
Sethia, Aditi
author_facet Madathil, Jayakrishnan
Misra, Neeldhara
Sethia, Aditi
contents We study almost-envy-freeness in house allocation, where $m$ houses are to be allocated among $n$ agents so that every agent receives exactly one house. An envy-free allocation need not exist, and therefore we may have to settle for relaxations of envy-freeness. But typical relaxations such as envy-free up to one good do not make sense for house allocation, as every agent is required to receive exactly one house. Hence we turn to different aggregate measures of envy as markers of fairness. In particular, we define the amount of envy experienced by an agent $a$ w.r.t. an allocation to be the number of agents that agent $a$ envies under that allocation. We quantify the envy generated by an allocation using three different metrics: 1) the number of agents who are envious; 2) the maximum amount of envy experienced by any agent; and 3) the total amount of envy experienced by all agents, and look for allocations that minimize one of the three metrics. We thus study three computational problems corresponding to each of the three metrics and prove a host of algorithmic and hardness results. We also suggest practical approaches for these problems via integer linear program (ILP) formulations and report the findings of our experimental evaluation of ILPs. Finally, we study the price of fairness (PoF), which quantifies the loss of welfare we must suffer due to the fairness requirements, and we prove a number of results on PoF, including tight bounds as well as algorithms that simultaneously optimize both welfare and fairness.
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id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2406_09744
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle The Cost and Complexity of Minimizing Envy in House Allocation
Madathil, Jayakrishnan
Misra, Neeldhara
Sethia, Aditi
Computer Science and Game Theory
We study almost-envy-freeness in house allocation, where $m$ houses are to be allocated among $n$ agents so that every agent receives exactly one house. An envy-free allocation need not exist, and therefore we may have to settle for relaxations of envy-freeness. But typical relaxations such as envy-free up to one good do not make sense for house allocation, as every agent is required to receive exactly one house. Hence we turn to different aggregate measures of envy as markers of fairness. In particular, we define the amount of envy experienced by an agent $a$ w.r.t. an allocation to be the number of agents that agent $a$ envies under that allocation. We quantify the envy generated by an allocation using three different metrics: 1) the number of agents who are envious; 2) the maximum amount of envy experienced by any agent; and 3) the total amount of envy experienced by all agents, and look for allocations that minimize one of the three metrics. We thus study three computational problems corresponding to each of the three metrics and prove a host of algorithmic and hardness results. We also suggest practical approaches for these problems via integer linear program (ILP) formulations and report the findings of our experimental evaluation of ILPs. Finally, we study the price of fairness (PoF), which quantifies the loss of welfare we must suffer due to the fairness requirements, and we prove a number of results on PoF, including tight bounds as well as algorithms that simultaneously optimize both welfare and fairness.
title The Cost and Complexity of Minimizing Envy in House Allocation
topic Computer Science and Game Theory
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2406.09744