Complexity Results and Exact Algorithms for Fair Division of Indivisible Items: A Survey

Complexity Results and Exact Algorithms for Fair Division of Indivisible Items: A Survey

Trung Thanh Nguyen, Jörg Rothe

Proceedings of the Thirty-Second International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence
Survey Track. Pages 6732-6740. https://doi.org/10.24963/ijcai.2023/754

Fair allocation of indivisible goods is a central topic in many AI applications. Unfortunately, the corresponding problems are known to be NP-hard for many fairness concepts, so unless P = NP, exact polynomial-time algorithms cannot exist for them. In practical applications, however, it would be highly desirable to find exact solutions as quickly as possible. This motivates the study of algorithms that—even though they only run in exponential time—are as fast as possible and exactly solve such problems. We present known complexity results for them and give a survey of important techniques for designing such algorithms, mainly focusing on four common fairness notions: max-min fairness, maximin share, maximizing Nash social welfare, and envy-freeness. We also highlight the most challenging open problems for future work.
Keywords:
Survey: Agent-based and Multi-agent Systems
Survey: AI Ethics, Trust, Fairness
Survey: Game Theory and Economic Paradigms