In fair division problems, we are given a set S of m items and a set N
of n agents with individual preferences, and the goal is to find an
allocation of items among agents so that each agent finds the allocation fair.
There are several established fairness concepts and envy-freeness is one of the
most extensively studied ones. However envy-free allocations do not always
exist when items are indivisible and this has motivated relaxations of
envy-freeness: envy-freeness up to one item (EF1) and envy-freeness up to any
item (EFX) are two well-studied relaxations. We consider the problem of finding
EF1 and EFX allocations for utility functions that are not necessarily
monotone, and propose four possible extensions of different strength to this
setting.
In particular, we present a polynomial-time algorithm for finding an EF1
allocation for two agents with arbitrary utility functions. An example is given
showing that EFX allocations need not exist for two agents with non-monotone,
non-additive, identical utility functions. However, when all agents have
monotone (not necessarily additive) identical utility functions, we prove that
an EFX allocation of chores always exists. As a step toward understanding the
general case, we discuss two subclasses of utility functions: Boolean utilities
that are {0,+1}-valued functions, and negative Boolean utilities that are
{0,−1}-valued functions. For the latter, we give a polynomial time
algorithm that finds an EFX allocation when the utility functions are
identical.Comment: 21 pages, 1 figur