Constrained Serial Dictatorships Can Be Fair
Constrained Serial Dictatorships Can Be Fair
Sylvain Bouveret, Hugo Gilbert, Jérôme Lang, Guillaume Méroué
Proceedings of the Thirty-Fourth International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence
Main Track. Pages 3762-3770.
https://doi.org/10.24963/ijcai.2025/418
When allocating indivisible items to agents, it is known that the only strategyproof mechanisms that satisfy a set of rather mild conditions are constrained serial dictatorships: given a fixed order over agents, at each step the designated agent chooses a given number of items (depending on her position in the sequence).
Agents who come earlier in the sequence have a larger choice of items; however, this advantage can be compensated by a higher number of items received by those who come later. How to balance priority in the sequence and number of items received is a nontrivial question.
We use a previous model, parameterized by a mapping from ranks to scores, a social welfare functional, and a distribution over preference profiles. For several meaningful choices of parameters, we show that the optimal sequence can be computed exactly in polynomial time or approximated using sampling.
Our results hold for several probabilistic models on preference profiles, with an emphasis on the Plackett-Luce model.
We conclude with experimental results showing how the optimal sequence is impacted by various parameters.
Keywords:
Game Theory and Economic Paradigms: GTEP: Computational social choice
Game Theory and Economic Paradigms: GTEP: Fair division
