Credit Fairness: Online Fairness in Shared Resource Pools

Credit Fairness: Online Fairness in Shared Resource Pools

Seyed Majid Zahedi, Rupert Freeman

Proceedings of the Thirty-Fifth International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence
Main Track. Pages 446-453. https://doi.org/10.24963/ijcai.2026/51

We study repeated allocation of shared resources among agents with time-varying demands and capped linear utilities. In this setting, independently maximizing the minimum utility in each round satisfies sharing incentives (agents weakly prefer participating in the mechanism to not participating), strategyproofness (agents have no incentive to misreport their demands), and Pareto efficiency. However, this max-min mechanism can lead to large disparities in the total resources received by agents, even when they have the same average demand. We introduce credit fairness, a property that, together with Pareto efficiency, strengthens sharing incentives by ensuring that agents who lend resources in early rounds are able to recoup them in later rounds. Credit fairness can be achieved in conjunction with either Pareto efficiency or strategyproofness individually, but we show that, under anonymity, it cannot be achieved together with both. We propose a mechanism that is credit fair and Pareto efficient, and evaluate it in a computational resource-sharing setting.
Keywords:
Agent-based and Multi-agent Systems: Resource allocation
Game Theory and Economic Paradigms: Fair division
Game Theory and Economic Paradigms: Noncooperative games