We study the fair allocation of mixture of indivisible goods and chores under lexicographic preferences---a subdomain of additive preferences. A prominent fairness notion for allocating indivisible items is envy-freeness up to any item (EFX). Yet, its existence and computation has remained a notable open problem. By identifying a class of instances with terrible chores, we show that determining the existence of an EFX allocation is NP-complete. This result immediately implies the intractability of EFX under additive preferences. Nonetheless, we propose a natural subclass of lexicographic preferences for which an EFX and Pareto optimal (PO) allocation is guaranteed to exist and can be computed efficiently for any mixed instance. Focusing on two weaker fairness notions, we investigate finding EF1 and Pareto optimal allocations for special instances with terrible chores, and show that MMS and PO allocations can be computed efficiently for any mixed instance with lexicographic preferences.
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New Fairness Concepts for Allocating Indivisible Items
For the fundamental problem of fairly dividing a set of indivisible items among agents, envy-freeness up to any item (EFX) and maximin fairness (MMS) are arguably the most compelling fairness concepts proposed till now. Unfortunately, despite significant efforts over the past few years, whether EFX allocations always exist is still an enigmatic open problem, let alone their efficient computation. Furthermore, today we know that MMS allocations are not always guaranteed to exist. These facts weaken the usefulness of both EFX and MMS, albeit their appealing conceptual characteristics.We propose two alternative fairness concepts—called epistemic EFX (EEFX) and minimum EFX value fairness (MXS)---inspired by EFX and MMS. For both, we explore their relationships to well-studied fairness notions and, more importantly, prove that EEFX and MXS allocations always exist and can be computed efficiently for additive valuations. Our results justify that the new fairness concepts are excellent alternatives to EFX and MMS.
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- Award ID(s):
- 1942321
- PAR ID:
- 10491686
- Publisher / Repository:
- International Joint Conferences on Artificial Intelligence Organization
- Date Published:
- ISBN:
- 978-1-956792-03-4
- Page Range / eLocation ID:
- 2554 to 2562
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Location:
- Macau, SAR China
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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