Related papers: Welfare-Optimal Serial Dictatorships have Polynomi…
Motivated by the success of the serial dictatorship mechanism in social choice settings, we explore its usefulness in tackling various combinatorial optimization problems. We do so by considering an abstract model, in which a set of agents…
We consider the assignment problem, where $n$ agents have to be matched to $n$ items. Each agent has a preference order over the items. In the serial dictatorship (SD) mechanism the agents act in a particular order and pick their most…
When allocating indivisible items to agents, it is known that the only strategyproof mechanisms that satisfy a set of rather mild conditions are constrained serial dictatorships: given a fixed order over agents, at each step the designated…
We study the efficiency (in terms of social welfare) of truthful and symmetric mechanisms in one-sided matching problems with {\em dichotomous preferences} and {\em normalized von Neumann-Morgenstern preferences}. We are particularly…
In priority-based matching, serial dictatorship (SD) is simple, strategyproof, and Pareto efficient, but not free of justified envy (i.e. fair). This paper studies how to fairly order agents in SD as a function of their priorities. I show…
Sequential allocation is a simple and widely studied mechanism to allocate indivisible items in turns to agents according to a pre-specified picking sequence of agents. At each turn, the current agent in the picking sequence picks its most…
Consider a university assigning students to courses and dorms. While many mechanisms are available, they each have their own drawbacks. Running serial dictatorship once for all goods is highly unfair, but running serial dictatorship…
We study social welfare in one-sided matching markets where the goal is to efficiently allocate n items to n agents that each have a complete, private preference list and a unit demand over the items. Our focus is on allocation mechanisms…
Sequential allocation is a simple and attractive mechanism for the allocation of indivisible goods. Agents take turns, according to a policy, to pick items. Sequential allocation is guaranteed to return an allocation which is efficient but…
The sequential allocation protocol is a simple and popular mechanism to allocate indivisible goods, in which the agents take turns to pick the items according to a predefined sequence. While this protocol is not strategy-proof, it has been…
We consider a simple sequential allocation procedure for sharing indivisible items between agents in which agents take turns to pick items. Supposing additive utilities and independence between the agents, we show that the expected utility…
We study the assignment problem of objects to agents with heterogeneous preferences under distributional constraints. Each agent is associated with a publicly known type and has a private ordinal ranking over objects. We are interested in…
Voting and assignment are two of the most fundamental settings in social choice theory. For both settings, random serial dictatorship (RSD) is a well-known rule that satisfies anonymity, ex post efficiency, and strategyproofness. Recently,…
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…
Sequential allocation is a simple allocation mechanism in which agents are given pre-specified turns and each agents gets the most preferred item that is still available. It has long been known that sequential allocation is not…
We study the truthful facility assignment problem, where a set of agents with private most-preferred points on a metric space are assigned to facilities that lie on the metric space, under capacity constraints on the facilities. The goal is…
In several socioeconomic-critical decision-making settings, such as fair resource allocation, climate policy, or AI alignment, multiple principals interact within a common arena. While it is well established that these principals may have…
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…
One cannot make truly fair decisions using integer linear programs unless one controls the selection probabilities of the (possibly many) optimal solutions. For this purpose, we propose a unified framework when binary decision variables…
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 $n \le 3$,…