English

New Algorithms for the Fair and Efficient Allocation of Indivisible Chores

Computer Science and Game Theory 2023-10-17 v2 Multiagent Systems

Abstract

We study the problem of fairly and efficiently allocating indivisible chores among agents with additive disutility functions. We consider the widely-used envy-based fairness properties of EF1 and EFX, in conjunction with the efficiency property of fractional Pareto-optimality (fPO). Existence (and computation) of an allocation that is simultaneously EF1/EFX and fPO are challenging open problems, and we make progress on both of them. We show existence of an allocation that is - EF1+fPO, when there are three agents, - EF1+fPO, when there are at most two disutility functions, - EFX+fPO, for three agents with bivalued disutilities. These results are constructive, based on strongly polynomial-time algorithms. We also investigate non-existence and show that an allocation that is EFX+fPO need not exist, even for two agents.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2212.02440,
  title  = {New Algorithms for the Fair and Efficient Allocation of Indivisible Chores},
  author = {Jugal Garg and Aniket Murhekar and John Qin},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2212.02440},
  year   = {2023}
}

Comments

43 pages. Accepted to IJCAI 2023. This version corrects a typo in Theorem 2

R2 v1 2026-06-28T07:22:42.083Z