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# Efficiency and fairness of resource utilisation under uncertainty: doctoral consortium

Buermann, Jan (2020) Efficiency and fairness of resource utilisation under uncertainty: doctoral consortium. Nineteenth International Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multi-Agent Systems, New Zealand. 09 - 13 May 2020. 3 pp .

Record type: Conference or Workshop Item (Paper)

## Abstract

The problem of multi-agent resource allocation is important and well-studied within AI and economics. The general assumption is that the amount of each resource is known beforehand. However, many real-world problems, the exact amount of each resource may not be known at the time of decision making, e,g. in the case of weather dependent renewable energy production. This work considers a homogeneous divisible resource where the available amount is given by a probability distribution. In general, a model for efficient usage under fairness and the possibilities of manipulation is studied. Firstly, the notion of ex-ante envy-freeness, where, in expectation, agents weakly prefer their allocation over every other agent's allocation is introduced. For this case the tension between fairness and social welfare is considered. The price of envy-freeness is at least $\Omega(n)$, where $n$ is the number of agents and the problem of optimising ex-ante social welfare subject to ex-ante envy-freeness is strongly NP-hard. Additionally, the possibility for an integer program to calculate the optimal ex-ante envy-free allocation for linear satiable valuation functions is presented.

Text
Efficiency_and_Fairness_of_Resource_Utilisation_under_Uncertainty - Accepted Manuscript

Accepted/In Press date: 18 February 2020
Published date: 14 May 2020
Venue - Dates: Nineteenth International Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multi-Agent Systems, New Zealand, 2020-05-09 - 2020-05-13
Keywords: Fair allocation, Social choice theory, Auctions and mechanism design

## Identifiers

Local EPrints ID: 439156
URI: http://eprints.soton.ac.uk/id/eprint/439156
PURE UUID: 09b129e5-e3a9-4b82-a13e-df8d445b2e71
ORCID for Jan Buermann: orcid.org/0000-0002-4981-6137

## Catalogue record

Date deposited: 06 Apr 2020 16:30

## Contributors

Author: Jan Buermann