Work

Finding fair and efficient allocations of indivisible chores

Year: 2025

Type: article

Abstract: Fair resource allocation has found widespread application across various fields, such as economics and computer science, and has garnered significant attention. In this paper, we address the problem of allocating a set of indivisible chores among a group of agents. Our objective is to achieve an allocation that satisfies the fairness criterion of weighted equitable up to one item and the efficiency criterion of fractional Pareto-Optimal. Inspired by Fisher Market equilibrium [9] , we construct a WEQ1 allocation among Market equilibrium through item transferring and price raising. Our algorithm provides a WEQ1+fPO allocation for additive valuations in pseudo-polynomial time. Moreover, we consider a special k -ary instance, i.e., each agent has at most k different disutility values for chores when k is a constant. We show that a WEQ1+fPO allocation can be computed in polynomial time in such case.

Source: Theoretical Computer Science

DOI: 10.1016/j.tcs.2025.115275

Authors: Zhe Liu, Wenguo Yang, Suixiang Gao

Institutions: Chinese Academy of Sciences, University of Chinese Academy of Sciences

Language: English

Topic: Game Theory and Voting Systems

Subfield: Economics and Econometrics

Field: Economics, Econometrics and Finance

Domain: Social Sciences

Open Access status: hybrid

Estimated APC paid: $2,880

Funder: National Natural Science Foundation of China