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Fair allocation of resources with uncertain availability

Burmann, Jan, Gerding, Enrico and Rastegari, Baharak (2020) Fair allocation of resources with uncertain availability. Nineteenth International Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multi-Agent Systems, , Auckland, New Zealand. 09 - 13 May 2020. 9 pp .

Record type: Conference or Workshop Item (Paper)

Abstract

Multi-agent resource allocation is an important and well-studied problem within AI and economics. It is generally assumed that the quantity of each resource is known a priori. However, in many real-world problems, such as the production of renewable energy which is typically weather dependent, the exact amount of each resource may not be known at the time of decision making. In this paper we investigate fair division of a homogeneous divisible resource where the available amount is given by a probability distribution. Specifically, we study the notion of ex-ante envy-freeness, where, in expectation, agents weakly prefer their allocation over every other agent's allocation. We analyse the trade-off between fairness and social welfare. We show that allocations satisfying ex-ante envy-freeness can result in higher social welfare compared to those satisfying ex-post envy-freeness. Nevertheless, the price of envy-freeness is at least $\Omega(n)$, where $n$ is the number of agents, and this is tight under concave valuation functions. Principally, we show that the problem of optimising ex-ante social welfare subject to ex-ante envy-freeness is NP-hard in the strong sense. Finally, we devise an integer program to calculate the optimal ex-ante envy-free allocation for linear satiable valuation functions.

Text
Fair_Allocation_of_Resources_with_Uncertain_Availability - Accepted Manuscript

Accepted/In Press date: 15 January 2020
Published date: May 2020
Venue - Dates: Nineteenth International Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multi-Agent Systems, , Auckland, New Zealand, 2020-05-09 - 2020-05-13
Keywords: Fair allocation, Social choice theory

Identifiers

Local EPrints ID: 438331
URI: http://eprints.soton.ac.uk/id/eprint/438331
PURE UUID: f3bcbc4a-5867-4d8e-9f90-8bf680f9825c
ORCID for Jan Burmann: orcid.org/0000-0002-4981-6137
ORCID for Enrico Gerding: orcid.org/0000-0001-7200-552X
ORCID for Baharak Rastegari: orcid.org/0000-0002-0985-573X

Catalogue record

Date deposited: 06 Mar 2020 17:30

Contributors

Author: Jan Burmann
Author: Enrico Gerding
Author: Baharak Rastegari