Temporal Fair Division of Indivisible Items

Fuente: arXiv
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Autori principali: Elkind, Edith, Lam, Alexander, Latifian, Mohamad, Neoh, Tzeh Yuan, Teh, Nicholas
Natura: Preprint
Pubblicazione: 2024
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author Elkind, Edith
Lam, Alexander
Latifian, Mohamad
Neoh, Tzeh Yuan
Teh, Nicholas
author_facet Elkind, Edith
Lam, Alexander
Latifian, Mohamad
Neoh, Tzeh Yuan
Teh, Nicholas
contents We study a fair division model where indivisible items arrive sequentially, and must be allocated immediately and irrevocably. Previous work on online fair division has shown impossibility results in achieving approximate envy-freeness under these constraints. In contrast, we consider an informed setting where the algorithm has complete knowledge of future items, and aim to ensure that the cumulative allocation at each round satisfies approximate envy-freeness -- which we define as temporal envy-freeness up to one item (TEF1). We focus on settings where items can be exclusively goods or exclusively chores. For goods, while TEF1 allocations may not always exist, we identify several special cases where they do -- two agents, two item types, generalized binary valuations, unimodal preferences -- and provide polynomial-time algorithms for these cases. We also prove that determining the existence of a TEF1 allocation is NP-hard. For chores, we establish analogous results for the special cases, but present a slightly weaker intractability result. We also establish the incompatibility between TEF1 and Pareto-optimality, with the implication that it is intractable to find a TEF1 allocation that maximizes any $p$-mean welfare, even for two agents.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2410_14593
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Temporal Fair Division of Indivisible Items
Elkind, Edith
Lam, Alexander
Latifian, Mohamad
Neoh, Tzeh Yuan
Teh, Nicholas
Computer Science and Game Theory
Artificial Intelligence
We study a fair division model where indivisible items arrive sequentially, and must be allocated immediately and irrevocably. Previous work on online fair division has shown impossibility results in achieving approximate envy-freeness under these constraints. In contrast, we consider an informed setting where the algorithm has complete knowledge of future items, and aim to ensure that the cumulative allocation at each round satisfies approximate envy-freeness -- which we define as temporal envy-freeness up to one item (TEF1). We focus on settings where items can be exclusively goods or exclusively chores. For goods, while TEF1 allocations may not always exist, we identify several special cases where they do -- two agents, two item types, generalized binary valuations, unimodal preferences -- and provide polynomial-time algorithms for these cases. We also prove that determining the existence of a TEF1 allocation is NP-hard. For chores, we establish analogous results for the special cases, but present a slightly weaker intractability result. We also establish the incompatibility between TEF1 and Pareto-optimality, with the implication that it is intractable to find a TEF1 allocation that maximizes any $p$-mean welfare, even for two agents.
title Temporal Fair Division of Indivisible Items
topic Computer Science and Game Theory
Artificial Intelligence
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2410.14593