Fair Societies: Algorithms for House Allocations

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Hosseini, Hadi, Roy, Sanjukta, Sethia, Aditi
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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author Hosseini, Hadi
Roy, Sanjukta
Sethia, Aditi
author_facet Hosseini, Hadi
Roy, Sanjukta
Sethia, Aditi
contents House Allocations concern with matchings involving one-sided preferences, where houses serve as a proxy encoding valuable indivisible resources (e.g. organs, course seats, subsidized public housing units) to be allocated among the agents. Every agent must receive exactly one resource. We study algorithmic approaches towards ensuring fairness in such settings. Minimizing the number of envious agents is known to be NP-complete (Kamiyama et al. 2021). We present two tractable approaches to deal with the computational hardness. When the agents are presented with an initial allocation of houses, we aim to refine this allocation by reallocating a bounded number of houses to reduce the number of envious agents. We show an efficient algorithm when the agents express preference for a bounded number of houses. Next, we consider single peaked preference domain and present a polynomial time algorithm for finding an allocation that minimize the number of envious agents. We further extend it to satisfy Pareto efficiency. Our former algorithm works for other measures of envy such as total envy, or maximum envy, with suitable modifications. Finally, we present an empirical analysis recording the fairness-welfare trade-off of our algorithms.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2511_07022
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Fair Societies: Algorithms for House Allocations
Hosseini, Hadi
Roy, Sanjukta
Sethia, Aditi
Computer Science and Game Theory
House Allocations concern with matchings involving one-sided preferences, where houses serve as a proxy encoding valuable indivisible resources (e.g. organs, course seats, subsidized public housing units) to be allocated among the agents. Every agent must receive exactly one resource. We study algorithmic approaches towards ensuring fairness in such settings. Minimizing the number of envious agents is known to be NP-complete (Kamiyama et al. 2021). We present two tractable approaches to deal with the computational hardness. When the agents are presented with an initial allocation of houses, we aim to refine this allocation by reallocating a bounded number of houses to reduce the number of envious agents. We show an efficient algorithm when the agents express preference for a bounded number of houses. Next, we consider single peaked preference domain and present a polynomial time algorithm for finding an allocation that minimize the number of envious agents. We further extend it to satisfy Pareto efficiency. Our former algorithm works for other measures of envy such as total envy, or maximum envy, with suitable modifications. Finally, we present an empirical analysis recording the fairness-welfare trade-off of our algorithms.
title Fair Societies: Algorithms for House Allocations
topic Computer Science and Game Theory
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.07022