Average Envy-freeness for Indivisible Items

Abstract

In fair division applications, agents may have unequal entitlements reflecting their different contributions. Moreover, the contributions of agents may depend on the allocation itself. Previous fairness notions designed for agents with equal or pre-determined entitlement fail to characterize fairness in these collaborative allocation scenarios. We propose a novel fairness notion of average envy-freeness (AEF), where the envy of agents is defined on the average value of items in the bundles. Average envy-freeness provides a reasonable comparison between agents based on the items they receive and reflects their entitlements. We study the complexity of finding AEF and its relaxation, average envy-freeness up to one item (AEF-1). While deciding if an AEF allocation exists is NP-complete, an AEF-1 allocation is guaranteed to exist and can be computed in polynomial time. We also study allocation with quotas, i.e. restrictions on the sizes of bundles. We prove that finding AEF-1 allocation satisfying a quota is NP-hard. Nevertheless, in the instances with a fixed number of agents, we propose polynomial-time algorithms to find AEF-1 allocation with a quota for binary valuation and approximated AEF-1 allocation with a quota for general valuation.