TY - GEN
T1 - Fair resource sharing and dorm assignment
AU - Li, Bo
AU - Li, Yingkai
N1 - Funding Information:
The authors thank Edith Elkind for her helpful discussions and anonymous referees for their valuable feedback. This work has been supported by the European Research Council (ERC) under grant number 639945 (ACCORD).
Publisher Copyright:
© 2020 International Foundation for Autonomous.
PY - 2020
Y1 - 2020
N2 - In this work, we study the fair resource sharing problem, where a set of resources needs to be shared by a set of agents. Each agent is unit-demand and each resource can serve a limited number of agents. The agents have (heterogeneous) preferences for the resources, and preferences for other agents with whom they share the resources. Our definition of fairness is mainly captured by envy-freeness. Due to the fact that an envy-free assignment may not exist even in simple settings, we propose a way to relax the definition: Pareto envy-freeness, where an assignment is Pareto envy-free if for any two agents i and j, agent i does not envy agent j for her received resource or the set of agents she shares the resource with. We study to what extent Pareto envy-free assignments exist. Particularly, we are interested in a typical model, dorm assignment problem, where a number of students need to be accommodated to the dorms with the same capacity and the students' preferences for dorm-mates are binary. We show that when the capacities of the dorms are 2, a Pareto envy-free assignment always exists and can be found in polynomial time; however, if the capacities increase to 3, Pareto envy-freeness cannot be guaranteed any more.
AB - In this work, we study the fair resource sharing problem, where a set of resources needs to be shared by a set of agents. Each agent is unit-demand and each resource can serve a limited number of agents. The agents have (heterogeneous) preferences for the resources, and preferences for other agents with whom they share the resources. Our definition of fairness is mainly captured by envy-freeness. Due to the fact that an envy-free assignment may not exist even in simple settings, we propose a way to relax the definition: Pareto envy-freeness, where an assignment is Pareto envy-free if for any two agents i and j, agent i does not envy agent j for her received resource or the set of agents she shares the resource with. We study to what extent Pareto envy-free assignments exist. Particularly, we are interested in a typical model, dorm assignment problem, where a number of students need to be accommodated to the dorms with the same capacity and the students' preferences for dorm-mates are binary. We show that when the capacities of the dorms are 2, a Pareto envy-free assignment always exists and can be found in polynomial time; however, if the capacities increase to 3, Pareto envy-freeness cannot be guaranteed any more.
KW - Dorm assignment
KW - Fair division
KW - Resource sharing
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=85096702127&partnerID=8YFLogxK
M3 - Conference article published in proceeding or book
AN - SCOPUS:85096702127
T3 - Proceedings of the International Joint Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems, AAMAS
SP - 708
EP - 716
BT - Proceedings of the 19th International Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems, AAMAS 2020
A2 - An, Bo
A2 - El Fallah Seghrouchni, Amal
A2 - Sukthankar, Gita
PB - International Foundation for Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems (IFAAMAS)
T2 - 19th International Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems, AAMAS 2020
Y2 - 19 May 2020
ER -