Harm Ratio: A Novel and Versatile Fairness Criterion

Fuente: arXiv
Gespeichert in:
Bibliographische Detailangaben
Hauptverfasser: Ebadian, Soroush, Freeman, Rupert, Shah, Nisarg
Format: Preprint
Veröffentlicht: 2024
Schlagworte:
Online-Zugang:
Tags: Tag hinzufügen
Keine Tags, Fügen Sie den ersten Tag hinzu!
_version_ 1866910632232615936
author Ebadian, Soroush
Freeman, Rupert
Shah, Nisarg
author_facet Ebadian, Soroush
Freeman, Rupert
Shah, Nisarg
contents Envy-freeness has become the cornerstone of fair division research. In settings where each individual is allocated a disjoint share of collective resources, it is a compelling fairness axiom which demands that no individual strictly prefer the allocation of another individual to their own. Unfortunately, in many real-life collective decision-making problems, the goal is to choose a (common) public outcome that is equally applicable to all individuals, and the notion of envy becomes vacuous. Consequently, this literature has avoided studying fairness criteria that focus on individuals feeling a sense of jealousy or resentment towards other individuals (rather than towards the system), missing out on a key aspect of fairness. In this work, we propose a novel fairness criterion, individual harm ratio, which is inspired by envy-freeness but applies to a broad range of collective decision-making settings. Theoretically, we identify minimal conditions under which this criterion and its groupwise extensions can be guaranteed, and study the computational complexity of related problems. Empirically, we conduct experiments with real data to show that our fairness criterion is powerful enough to differentiate between prominent decision-making algorithms for a range of tasks from voting and fair division to participatory budgeting and peer review.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2410_02977
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Harm Ratio: A Novel and Versatile Fairness Criterion
Ebadian, Soroush
Freeman, Rupert
Shah, Nisarg
Computer Science and Game Theory
Artificial Intelligence
Envy-freeness has become the cornerstone of fair division research. In settings where each individual is allocated a disjoint share of collective resources, it is a compelling fairness axiom which demands that no individual strictly prefer the allocation of another individual to their own. Unfortunately, in many real-life collective decision-making problems, the goal is to choose a (common) public outcome that is equally applicable to all individuals, and the notion of envy becomes vacuous. Consequently, this literature has avoided studying fairness criteria that focus on individuals feeling a sense of jealousy or resentment towards other individuals (rather than towards the system), missing out on a key aspect of fairness. In this work, we propose a novel fairness criterion, individual harm ratio, which is inspired by envy-freeness but applies to a broad range of collective decision-making settings. Theoretically, we identify minimal conditions under which this criterion and its groupwise extensions can be guaranteed, and study the computational complexity of related problems. Empirically, we conduct experiments with real data to show that our fairness criterion is powerful enough to differentiate between prominent decision-making algorithms for a range of tasks from voting and fair division to participatory budgeting and peer review.
title Harm Ratio: A Novel and Versatile Fairness Criterion
topic Computer Science and Game Theory
Artificial Intelligence
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2410.02977