Almost Group Envy-free Allocation of Indivisible Goods and Chores

Almost Group Envy-free Allocation of Indivisible Goods and Chores

Haris Aziz, Simon Rey

Proceedings of the Twenty-Ninth International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence

We consider a multi-agent resource allocation setting in which an agent's utility may decrease or increase when an item is allocated. We take the group envy-freeness concept that is well-established in the literature and present stronger and relaxed versions that are especially suitable for the allocation of indivisible items. Of particular interest is a concept called group envy-freeness up to one item (GEF1). We then present a clear taxonomy of the fairness concepts. We study which fairness concepts guarantee the existence of a fair allocation under which preference domain. For two natural classes of additive utilities, we design polynomial-time algorithms to compute a GEF1 allocation. We also prove that checking whether a given allocation satisfies GEF1 is coNP-complete when there are either only goods, only chores or both.
Keywords:
Agent-based and Multi-agent Systems: Computational Social Choice
Agent-based and Multi-agent Systems: Resource Allocation