Year: 2021
Type: preprint
Abstract: We consider the problem of allocating divisible items among multiple agents, and consider the setting where any agent is allowed to introduce diversity constraints on the items they are allocated. We motivate this via settings where the items themselves correspond to user ad slots or task workers with attributes such as race and gender on which the principal seeks to achieve demographic parity. We consider the following question: When an agent expresses diversity constraints into an allocation rule, is the allocation of other agents hurt significantly? If this happens, the cost of introducing such constraints is disproportionately borne by agents who do not benefit from diversity. We codify this via two desiderata capturing robustness. These are no negative externality -- other agents are not hurt -- and monotonicity -- the agent enforcing the constraint does not see a large increase in value. We show in a formal sense that the Nash Welfare rule that maximizes product of agent values is uniquely positioned to be robust when diversity constraints are introduced, while almost all other natural allocation rules fail this criterion. We also show that the guarantees achieved by Nash Welfare are nearly optimal within a widely studied class of allocation rules. We finally perform an empirical simulation on real-world data that models ad allocations to show that this gap between Nash Welfare and other rules persists in the wild.
Source: arXiv (Cornell University)
Language: English
Subfield: Economics and Econometrics
Domain: Social Sciences
SDG: Reduced inequalities
Open Access status: green
Awards: SaTC: CORE: Medium: Collaborative Research: Understanding and Mitigating the Privacy and Societal Risks of Advanced Advertising Targeting and Tracking, CAREER: Towards Privacy and Fairness in Multi-Sided Platforms, G3798864471, G4170019184, AitF: Collaborative Research: Fair and Efficient Societal Decision Making via Collaborative Convex Optimization, SaTC: Frontiers: Collaborative: Protecting Personal Data Flow on the Internet, G5972442391, AF: Small: Algorithm and Incentive Design for Modern Resource Allocation Platforms, G8876996369
OpenAlex ID: W3204788494