Price of Fairness for allocating a bounded resource

Gaia Nicosia, Andrea Pacifici and Ulrich Pferschy

European Journal of Operational Research, 2017, vol. 257, issue 3, 933-943

Abstract: We study the problem faced by a decision maker who wants to allocate a scarce resource among several agents in order to maximize the total utility. An optimal solution may present a very unbalanced allocation of the resource to the agents and hence be perceived as unfair. On the other hand balanced allocations may be far from the optimum. In this paper we are interested in assessing the quality of fair solutions, i.e., in measuring the system efficiency loss under a fair allocation compared to the one that maximizes the total utility. This indicator is called the Price of Fairness and we study it under three different definitions of fairness, namely maximin, Kalai–Smorodinski and proportional fairness.

Keywords: Multi-agent systems; Price of Fairness; Subset Sum Problem (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2017
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Citations: View citations in EconPapers (14)

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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:ejores:v:257:y:2017:i:3:p:933-943

DOI: 10.1016/j.ejor.2016.08.013

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