{"type":"ScholarlyArticle","title":"Computing Epistemtic EF1 and Pareto-Optimal Allocations of Indivisible Chores","authors":[{"name":"Jugal Garg","slug":"jugal-garg","given":"Jugal","family":"Garg","affiliation":""},{"name":"Aniket Murhekar","slug":"aniket-murhekar","given":"Aniket","family":"Murhekar","affiliation":""}],"abstract":"We study the allocation of m indivisible chores among n agents with additive disutilities under the fairness notion of envy-freeness up to one chore (EF1) and the efficiency notion of Pareto-optimality (PO). Although the existence of an allocation satisfying both EF1 and PO was recently established using a highly non-constructive fixed-point argument, an effective algorithm for computing such an allocation remains elusive, prompting the study of meaningful relaxations of these desiderata. \r\n\r\nPrior work introduced a natural relaxation through the concept of epistemic fairness: an allocation is said to be epistemic EF1 (EEF1), if for every agent i, it is possible to re-allocate the bundles of agents other than i such that i becomes EF1. In this work, we present a pseudo-polynomial time algorithm for computing an allocation of chores that is both EEF1 and PO. This gives an efficient polynomial-time algorithm for most practical settings where disutility values are integral and polynomially bounded in m and n. Our result employs the competitive equilibrium framework and relies on several technical insights that both utilize the distinct structure of epistemic EF1 and address the challenges it introduces.","doi":"10.24963/ijcai.2026/381","url":"https://ijcai.org/proceedings/2026/381","pdf":"https://ijcai.org/proceedings/2026/0381.pdf","markdown":"https://ijcai.org/proceedings/2026/381.md","bibtex":"https://ijcai.org/proceedings/2026/bibtex/381","volume":{"slug":"2026","title":"Proceedings of the Thirty-Fifth International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence","short_title":"IJCAI 2026","url":"https://ijcai.org/proceedings/2026/","year":2026,"location":"Bremen, Germany","dates":"15-21 August 2026","editors":"Diego Calvanese","isbn":"978-1-956792-09-6","publisher":"International Joint Conferences on Artificial Intelligence Organization","doi_prefix":"10.24963/ijcai.2026"},"section":"Game Theory and Economic Paradigms","track":"Main Track","number":381,"pages":{"first":3427,"last":3435},"keywords":["Game Theory and Economic Paradigms: Fair division","Game Theory and Economic Paradigms: Computational social choice"],"videos":[],"references":[],"license_note":"Copyright International Joint Conferences on Artificial Intelligence."}