22 research outputs found
Allocation in Practice
How do we allocate scarcere sources? How do we fairly allocate costs? These
are two pressing challenges facing society today. I discuss two recent projects
at NICTA concerning resource and cost allocation. In the first, we have been
working with FoodBank Local, a social startup working in collaboration with
food bank charities around the world to optimise the logistics of collecting
and distributing donated food. Before we can distribute this food, we must
decide how to allocate it to different charities and food kitchens. This gives
rise to a fair division problem with several new dimensions, rarely considered
in the literature. In the second, we have been looking at cost allocation
within the distribution network of a large multinational company. This also has
several new dimensions rarely considered in the literature.Comment: To appear in Proc. of 37th edition of the German Conference on
Artificial Intelligence (KI 2014), Springer LNC
Monotonicity and Competitive Equilibrium in Cake-cutting
We study the monotonicity properties of solutions in the classic problem of
fair cake-cutting --- dividing a heterogeneous resource among agents with
different preferences. Resource- and population-monotonicity relate to
scenarios where the cake, or the number of participants who divide the cake,
changes. It is required that the utility of all participants change in the same
direction: either all of them are better-off (if there is more to share or
fewer to share among) or all are worse-off (if there is less to share or more
to share among).
We formally introduce these concepts to the cake-cutting problem and examine
whether they are satisfied by various common division rules. We prove that the
Nash-optimal rule, which maximizes the product of utilities, is
resource-monotonic and population-monotonic, in addition to being
Pareto-optimal, envy-free and satisfying a strong competitive-equilibrium
condition. Moreover, we prove that it is the only rule among a natural family
of welfare-maximizing rules that is both proportional and resource-monotonic.Comment: Revised versio
Online Fair Division: A Survey
We survey a burgeoning and promising new research area that considers the
online nature of many practical fair division problems. We identify wide
variety of such online fair division problems, as well as discuss new
mechanisms and normative properties that apply to this online setting. The
online nature of such fair division problems provides both opportunities and
challenges such as the possibility to develop new online mechanisms as well as
the difficulty of dealing with an uncertain future.Comment: Accepted by the 34th AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI
2020
Redividing the Cake
A heterogeneous resource, such as a land-estate, is already divided among
several agents in an unfair way. It should be re-divided among the agents in a
way that balances fairness with ownership rights. We present re-division
protocols that attain various trade-off points between fairness and ownership
rights, in various settings differing in the geometric constraints on the
allotments: (a) no geometric constraints; (b) connectivity --- the cake is a
one-dimensional interval and each piece must be a contiguous interval; (c)
rectangularity --- the cake is a two-dimensional rectangle or rectilinear
polygon and the pieces should be rectangles; (d) convexity --- the cake is a
two-dimensional convex polygon and the pieces should be convex.
Our re-division protocols have implications on another problem: the
price-of-fairness --- the loss of social welfare caused by fairness
requirements. Each protocol implies an upper bound on the price-of-fairness
with the respective geometric constraints.Comment: Extended IJCAI 2018 version. Previous name: "How to Re-Divide a Cake
Fairly