 Randomized strategyproof mechanisms with best of both worlds fairness and efficiencyAnkang Sun and Bo Chen European Journal of Operational Research, 2025, vol. 324, issue 3, 941-952 Abstract: We study the problem of mechanism design for allocating a set of indivisible items among agents with private preferences on items. We aim to design a mechanism that is strategyproof (in which agents find it optimal to report their true preferences) and ensures a certain level of fairness and efficiency. We first establish that no deterministic mechanism can simultaneously be strategyproof, fair, and efficient for the allocation of indivisible chores. We then introduce randomness to address this impossibility. For allocating indivisible chores, we propose randomized mechanisms that are strategyproof in expectation as well as ex-ante and ex-post (best of both worlds) fair and efficient. For allocating mixed items—where an item may be a good (positive utility) for one agent and a chore (negative utility) for another, we propose randomized mechanisms that are strategyproof in expectation while ensuring fairness and efficiency for two-agent scenarios. Keywords: Multi-agent systems; Resource allocation; Mechanism design; Strategyproof; Randomization (search for similar items in EconPapers) Downloads: (external link) Related works: Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:ejores:v:324:y:2025:i:3:p:941-952 DOI: 10.1016/j.ejor.2025.02.027 Access Statistics for this article European Journal of Operational Research is currently edited by Roman Slowinski, Jesus Artalejo, Jean-Charles. Billaut, Robert Dyson and Lorenzo Peccati More articles in European Journal of Operational Research from Elsevier |
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