Maximin-Aware Allocations of Indivisible Goods

Maximin-Aware Allocations of Indivisible Goods

Hau Chan, Jing Chen, Bo Li, Xiaowei Wu

Proceedings of the Twenty-Eighth International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence
Main track. Pages 137-143. https://doi.org/10.24963/ijcai.2019/20

We study envy-free allocations of indivisible goods to agents in settings where each agent is unaware of the goods allocated to other agents. In particular, we propose the maximin aware (MMA) fairness measure, which guarantees that every agent, given the bundle allocated to her, is aware that she does not envy at least one other agent, even if she does not know how the other goods are distributed among other agents. We also introduce two of its relaxations, and discuss their egalitarian guarantee and existence. Finally, we present a polynomial-time algorithm, which computes an allocation that approximately satisfies MMA or its relaxations. Interestingly, the returned allocation is also 1/2-approximate EFX when all agents have sub- additive valuations, which improves the algorithm in [Plaut and Roughgarden, 2018].
Keywords:
Agent-based and Multi-agent Systems: Computational Social Choice
Agent-based and Multi-agent Systems: Resource Allocation