A New Approach to Fair Distribution of Welfare

Moshe Babaioff, Uriel Feige*

*Corresponding author for this work

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingConference contributionpeer-review

Abstract

We consider transferable-utility profit-sharing games that arise from settings in which agents need to jointly choose one of several alternatives, and may use transfers to redistribute the welfare generated by the chosen alternative. One such setting is the Shared–Rental problem, in which students jointly rent an apartment and need to decide which bedroom to allocate to each student, depending on the student’s preferences. Many solution concepts have been proposed for such settings, ranging from mechanisms without transfers, such as Random Priority and the Eating mechanism, to mechanisms with transfers, such as envy free solutions, the Shapley value, and the Kalai-Smorodinsky bargaining solution. We seek a solution concept that satisfies three natural properties, concerning efficiency, fairness and decomposition. We observe that every solution concept known (to us) fails to satisfy at least one of the three properties. We present a new solution concept, designed so as to satisfy the three properties. A certain submodularity condition (which holds in interesting special cases such as the Shared-Rental setting) implies both existence and uniqueness of our solution concept.

Original languageEnglish
Title of host publicationWeb and Internet Economics - 15th International Conference, WINE 2019, Proceedings
EditorsIoannis Caragiannis, Vahab Mirrokni, Evdokia Nikolova
PublisherSpringer
Pages71-84
Number of pages14
ISBN (Print)9783030353889
DOIs
StatePublished - 2019
Externally publishedYes
Event15th Conference on Web and Internet Economics, WINE 2019 - New York City, United States
Duration: 10 Dec 201912 Dec 2019

Publication series

NameLecture Notes in Computer Science (including subseries Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence and Lecture Notes in Bioinformatics)
Volume11920 LNCS
ISSN (Print)0302-9743
ISSN (Electronic)1611-3349

Conference

Conference15th Conference on Web and Internet Economics, WINE 2019
Country/TerritoryUnited States
CityNew York City
Period10/12/1912/12/19

Bibliographical note

Publisher Copyright:
© 2019, Springer Nature Switzerland AG.

Keywords

  • Anticore
  • Envy-free
  • Fairness
  • Shared-Rental

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