Related papers: Egalitarianism of Random Assignment Mechanisms
Two prominent objectives in social choice are utilitarian - maximizing the sum of agents' utilities, and leximin - maximizing the smallest agent's utility, then the second-smallest, etc. Utilitarianism is typically computationally easier to…
In fair division problems, the notion of price of fairness measures the loss in welfare due to a fairness constraint. Prior work on the price of fairness has focused primarily on envy-freeness up to one good (EF1) as the fairness…
Given a set of $n$ individuals with strict preferences over $m$ indivisible objects, the Random Serial Dictatorship (RSD) mechanism is a method for allocating objects to individuals in a way that is efficient, fair, and…
We consider the problem of fairly dividing indivisible goods among agents with additive valuations. It is known that an Epistemic EFX and $2/3$-MMS allocation can be obtained using the Envy-Cycle-Elimination (ECE) algorithm. In this work,…
We examine the problem of assigning plots of land to prospective buyers who prefer living next to their friends. They care not only about the plot they receive, but also about their neighbors. This externality results in a highly…
Envy-freeness and Pareto Efficiency are two major goals in welfare economics. The existence of an allocation that satisfies both conditions has been studied for a long time. Whether items are indivisible or divisible, it is impossible to…
We make a detailed analysis of three key algorithms (Serial Dictatorship and the naive and adaptive variants of the Boston algorithm) for the housing allocation problem, under the assumption that agent preferences are chosen iid uniformly…
We consider randomized mechanisms with optional participation. Preferences over lotteries are modeled using skew-symmetric bilinear (SSB) utility functions, a generalization of classic von Neumann-Morgenstern utility functions. We show that…
We consider social welfare functions when the preferences of individual agents and society maximize subjective expected utility in the tradition of Savage. A system of axioms is introduced whose unique solution is the social welfare…
We study the assignment of indivisible goods to individuals without monetary transfers. Previous literature has mainly focused on efficiency and individually fair assignments; consequently, egalitarian concerns have been overlooked. Drawing…
A simple mechanism for allocating indivisible resources is sequential allocation in which agents take turns to pick items. We focus on possible and necessary allocation problems, checking whether allocations of a given form occur in some or…
Random serial dictatorship (RSD) is a randomized assignment rule that - given a set of $n$ agents with strict preferences over $n$ houses - satisfies equal treatment of equals, ex post efficiency, and strategyproofness. For $n \le 3$,…
Explore-and-exploit tradeoffs play a key role in recommendation systems (RSs), aiming at serving users better by learning from previous interactions. Despite their commercial success, the societal effects of explore-and-exploit mechanisms…
Fair allocation of indivisible goods studies allocating $m$ goods among $n$ agents in a fair manner. While fairness is a fundamental requirement in many real-world applications, it often conflicts with (economic) efficiency. This raises a…
Motivated by applications such as college admission and insurance rate determination, we propose an evaluation problem where the inputs are controlled by strategic individuals who can modify their features at a cost. A learner can only…
We consider the allocation of indivisible objects when agents have preferences over their own allocations, but share the ownership of the resources to be distributed. Examples might include seats in public schools, faculty offices, and time…
We consider the task of assigning indivisible goods to a set of agents in a fair manner. Our notion of fairness is Nash social welfare, i.e., the goal is to maximize the geometric mean of the utilities of the agents. Each good comes in…
We propose a simple yet effective solution to tackle the often-competing goals of fairness and utility in classification tasks. While fairness ensures that the model's predictions are unbiased and do not discriminate against any particular…
We study a resource allocation setting where $m$ discrete items are to be divided among $n$ agents with additive utilities, and the agents' utilities for individual items are drawn at random from a probability distribution. Since common…
In this work, we propose an axiomatic approach for measuring the performance/welfare of a system consisting of concurrent agents in a resource-driven system. Our approach provides a unifying view on popular system optimality principles,…