Equitable Allocations of Indivisible Chores
Abstract
We study fair allocation of indivisible chores (i.e., items with non-positive value) among agents with additive valuations. An allocation is deemed fair if it is (approximately) equitable, which means that the disutilities of the agents are (approximately) equal. Our main theoretical contribution is to show that there always exists an allocation that is simultaneously equitable up to one chore (EQ1) and Pareto optimal (PO), and to provide a pseudopolynomial-time algorithm for computing such an allocation. In addition, we observe that the Leximin solution---which is known to satisfy a strong form of approximate equitability in the goods setting---fails to satisfy even EQ1 for chores. It does, however, satisfy a novel fairness notion that we call equitability up to any duplicated chore. Our experiments on synthetic as well as real-world data obtained from the Spliddit website reveal that the algorithms considered in our work satisfy approximate fairness and efficiency properties significantly more often than the algorithm currently deployed on Spliddit.
Keywords
Cite
@article{arxiv.2002.11504,
title = {Equitable Allocations of Indivisible Chores},
author = {Rupert Freeman and Sujoy Sikdar and Rohit Vaish and Lirong Xia},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2002.11504},
year = {2020}
}
Comments
Full version of a paper that appears at International Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multi-Agent Systems (AAMAS) 2020. arXiv admin note: substantial text overlap with arXiv:1905.10656