Honor Among Bandits: No-Regret Learning for Online Fair Division

Fuente: arXiv
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Hauptverfasser: Procaccia, Ariel D., Schiffer, Benjamin, Zhang, Shirley
Format: Preprint
Veröffentlicht: 2024
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author Procaccia, Ariel D.
Schiffer, Benjamin
Zhang, Shirley
author_facet Procaccia, Ariel D.
Schiffer, Benjamin
Zhang, Shirley
contents We consider the problem of online fair division of indivisible goods to players when there are a finite number of types of goods and player values are drawn from distributions with unknown means. Our goal is to maximize social welfare subject to allocating the goods fairly in expectation. When a player's value for an item is unknown at the time of allocation, we show that this problem reduces to a variant of (stochastic) multi-armed bandits, where there exists an arm for each player's value for each type of good. At each time step, we choose a distribution over arms which determines how the next item is allocated. We consider two sets of fairness constraints for this problem: envy-freeness in expectation and proportionality in expectation. Our main result is the design of an explore-then-commit algorithm that achieves $\tilde{O}(T^{2/3})$ regret while maintaining either fairness constraint. This result relies on unique properties fundamental to fair-division constraints that allow faster rates of learning, despite the restricted action space. We also prove a lower bound of $\tildeΩ(T^{2/3})$ regret for our setting, showing that our results are tight.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2407_01795
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Honor Among Bandits: No-Regret Learning for Online Fair Division
Procaccia, Ariel D.
Schiffer, Benjamin
Zhang, Shirley
Computer Science and Game Theory
Machine Learning
We consider the problem of online fair division of indivisible goods to players when there are a finite number of types of goods and player values are drawn from distributions with unknown means. Our goal is to maximize social welfare subject to allocating the goods fairly in expectation. When a player's value for an item is unknown at the time of allocation, we show that this problem reduces to a variant of (stochastic) multi-armed bandits, where there exists an arm for each player's value for each type of good. At each time step, we choose a distribution over arms which determines how the next item is allocated. We consider two sets of fairness constraints for this problem: envy-freeness in expectation and proportionality in expectation. Our main result is the design of an explore-then-commit algorithm that achieves $\tilde{O}(T^{2/3})$ regret while maintaining either fairness constraint. This result relies on unique properties fundamental to fair-division constraints that allow faster rates of learning, despite the restricted action space. We also prove a lower bound of $\tildeΩ(T^{2/3})$ regret for our setting, showing that our results are tight.
title Honor Among Bandits: No-Regret Learning for Online Fair Division
topic Computer Science and Game Theory
Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2407.01795