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Title: Computing welfare-Maximizing fair allocations of indivisible goods
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).  more » « less
Award ID(s):
2007955
NSF-PAR ID:
10386120
Author(s) / Creator(s):
; ; ;
Date Published:
Journal Name:
European journal of operational research
ISSN:
0377-2217
Format(s):
Medium: X
Sponsoring Org:
National Science Foundation
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