700 research outputs found
Asymptotic Existence of Proportionally Fair Allocations
Fair division has long been an important problem in the economics literature.
In this note, we consider the existence of proportionally fair allocations of
indivisible goods, i.e., allocations of indivisible goods in which every agent
gets at least her proportionally fair share according to her own utility
function. We show that when utilities are additive and utilities for individual
goods are drawn independently at random from a distribution, proportionally
fair allocations exist with high probability if the number of goods is a
multiple of the number of agents or if the number of goods grows asymptotically
faster than the number of agents
The Core of the Participatory Budgeting Problem
In participatory budgeting, communities collectively decide on the allocation
of public tax dollars for local public projects. In this work, we consider the
question of fairly aggregating the preferences of community members to
determine an allocation of funds to projects. This problem is different from
standard fair resource allocation because of public goods: The allocated goods
benefit all users simultaneously. Fairness is crucial in participatory decision
making, since generating equitable outcomes is an important goal of these
processes. We argue that the classic game theoretic notion of core captures
fairness in the setting. To compute the core, we first develop a novel
characterization of a public goods market equilibrium called the Lindahl
equilibrium, which is always a core solution. We then provide the first (to our
knowledge) polynomial time algorithm for computing such an equilibrium for a
broad set of utility functions; our algorithm also generalizes (in a
non-trivial way) the well-known concept of proportional fairness. We use our
theoretical insights to perform experiments on real participatory budgeting
voting data. We empirically show that the core can be efficiently computed for
utility functions that naturally model our practical setting, and examine the
relation of the core with the familiar welfare objective. Finally, we address
concerns of incentives and mechanism design by developing a randomized
approximately dominant-strategy truthful mechanism building on the exponential
mechanism from differential privacy
Fairly Allocating Contiguous Blocks of Indivisible Items
In this paper, we study the classic problem of fairly allocating indivisible
items with the extra feature that the items lie on a line. Our goal is to find
a fair allocation that is contiguous, meaning that the bundle of each agent
forms a contiguous block on the line. While allocations satisfying the
classical fairness notions of proportionality, envy-freeness, and equitability
are not guaranteed to exist even without the contiguity requirement, we show
the existence of contiguous allocations satisfying approximate versions of
these notions that do not degrade as the number of agents or items increases.
We also study the efficiency loss of contiguous allocations due to fairness
constraints.Comment: Appears in the 10th International Symposium on Algorithmic Game
Theory (SAGT), 201
Statistical Multiplexing and Traffic Shaping Games for Network Slicing
Next generation wireless architectures are expected to enable slices of
shared wireless infrastructure which are customized to specific mobile
operators/services. Given infrastructure costs and the stochastic nature of
mobile services' spatial loads, it is highly desirable to achieve efficient
statistical multiplexing amongst such slices. We study a simple dynamic
resource sharing policy which allocates a 'share' of a pool of (distributed)
resources to each slice-Share Constrained Proportionally Fair (SCPF). We give a
characterization of SCPF's performance gains over static slicing and general
processor sharing. We show that higher gains are obtained when a slice's
spatial load is more 'imbalanced' than, and/or 'orthogonal' to, the aggregate
network load, and that the overall gain across slices is positive. We then
address the associated dimensioning problem. Under SCPF, traditional network
dimensioning translates to a coupled share dimensioning problem, which
characterizes the existence of a feasible share allocation given slices'
expected loads and performance requirements. We provide a solution to robust
share dimensioning for SCPF-based network slicing. Slices may wish to
unilaterally manage their users' performance via admission control which
maximizes their carried loads subject to performance requirements. We show this
can be modeled as a 'traffic shaping' game with an achievable Nash equilibrium.
Under high loads, the equilibrium is explicitly characterized, as are the gains
in the carried load under SCPF vs. static slicing. Detailed simulations of a
wireless infrastructure supporting multiple slices with heterogeneous mobile
loads show the fidelity of our models and range of validity of our high load
equilibrium analysis
Approximate Maximin Shares for Groups of Agents
We investigate the problem of fairly allocating indivisible goods among
interested agents using the concept of maximin share. Procaccia and Wang showed
that while an allocation that gives every agent at least her maximin share does
not necessarily exist, one that gives every agent at least of her share
always does. In this paper, we consider the more general setting where we
allocate the goods to groups of agents. The agents in each group share the same
set of goods even though they may have conflicting preferences. For two groups,
we characterize the cardinality of the groups for which a constant factor
approximation of the maximin share is possible regardless of the number of
goods. We also show settings where an approximation is possible or impossible
when there are several groups.Comment: To appear in the 10th International Symposium on Algorithmic Game
Theory (SAGT), 201
Mixed sharing rules
It is wellknown that a group of individuals contributing to a joint production process with diminishing returns will tend, in equilibrium, to put in too little effort if shares of the output are exogenous, and will put in too much effort if their shares are proportional to their inputs. We consider 'mixed' sharing rules, in which some proportion of the output will be shared exogenously, and the rest proportionally. We examine the efficiency properties of such rules, compare them with serial sharing rules, and suggest a sharing game whose noncooperative equilibrium is, in certain circumstances, Pareto efficientsurplus sharing, cost sharing, aggregative games
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