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arXiv · 2209.15416

Optimal Efficiency-Envy Trade-Off via Optimal Transport

Steven Yin·Christian Kroer
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Abstract

We consider the problem of allocating a distribution of items to $n$ recipients where each recipient has to be allocated a fixed, prespecified fraction of all items, while ensuring that each recipient does not experience too much envy. We show that this problem can be formulated as a variant of the semi-discrete optimal transport (OT) problem, whose solution structure in this case has a concise representation and a simple geometric interpretation. Unlike existing literature that treats envy-freeness as a hard constraint, our formulation allows us to \emph{optimally} trade off efficiency and envy continuously. Additionally, we study the statistical properties of the space of our OT based allocation policies by showing a polynomial bound on the number of samples needed to approximate the optimal solution from samples. Our approach is suitable for large-scale fair allocation problems such as the blood donation matching problem, and we show numerically that it performs well on a prior realistic data simulator.

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Steven Yin, Christian Kroer. 2022-09-25. Optimal Efficiency-Envy Trade-Off via Optimal Transport. https://arxiv.org/abs/2209.15416

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