Computing Welfare-Maximizing Fair Allocations of Indivisible Goods
Abstract
We analyze the run-time complexity of computing allocations that are both fair and maximize the utilitarian social welfare, defined as the sum of agents' utilities. We focus on two tractable fairness concepts: envy-freeness up to one item (EF1) and proportionality up to one item (PROP1). We consider two computational problems: (1) Among the utilitarian-maximal allocations, decide whether there exists one that is also fair; (2) among the fair allocations, compute one that maximizes the utilitarian welfare. We show that both problems are strongly NP-hard when the number of agents is variable, and remain NP-hard for a fixed number of agents greater than two. For the special case of two agents, we find that problem (1) is polynomial-time solvable, while problem (2) remains NP-hard. Finally, with a fixed number of agents, we design pseudopolynomial-time algorithms for both problems. We extend our results to the stronger fairness notions envy-freeness up to any item (EFx) and proportionality up to any item (PROPx).
- Publication:
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arXiv e-prints
- Pub Date:
- December 2020
- DOI:
- 10.48550/arXiv.2012.03979
- arXiv:
- arXiv:2012.03979
- Bibcode:
- 2020arXiv201203979A
- Keywords:
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- Computer Science - Computer Science and Game Theory
- E-Print:
- Added experiments comparing dynamic programming to integer linear programming