Simultaneous Envy and Equitability Guarantees

Hadi Hosseini, Shraddha Pathak, Lirong Xia and Chengkai Zhang

Papers from arXiv.org

Abstract: Recent work in fair division has focused on either simultaneously satisfying closely related fairness notions or achieving a single notion across the ex-ante and ex-post worlds. We study the compatibility of two fundamentally different fairness notions: envy-freeness and equitability. For indivisible goods-only and chores-only settings, we study the existence and complexity of simultaneously satisfying their relaxations, revealing sharp contrasts between the two settings. For normalized binary goods, we give a polynomial-time algorithm for computing an EF1+EQ1 allocation with at most seven agents, but also construct a normalized instance with a larger number of agents for which no such allocation exists. In sharp contrast, binary chores admit the stronger EFX+EQX guarantee for any number of agents, even without normalization. We further initiate the study of cross-notion ex-ante and ex-post guarantees, asking whether randomized allocations can provide ex-ante guarantees for one notion while preserving ex-post guarantees for another.

Date: 2026-08, Revised 2026-09
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-des, nep-inv and nep-mic
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