Decreasing Demand Procedure
The Decreasing Demand procedure is a procedure for fair item allocation. It yields a Pareto-efficient division that maximizes the rank of the agent with the lowest rank. This corresponds to the Rawlsian justice criterion of taking care of the worst-off agent. The procedure was developed by Dorothea Herreiner and Clemens Puppe. Description Each agent is supposed to have a linear ranking on all bundles of items. The agents are queried in a round-robin fashion: each agent, in turn, reports his next bundle in the ranking, going from the best to the worst. After each report, the procedure checks whether it is possible to construct a complete partition of the items based on the reports made so far. If it is possible, then the procedure stops and returns one such partition. If there is more than one partition, then a Pareto-efficient one is returned. The procedure produces "balanced" allocations, that is, allocations which maximize the rank in the preference ordering of the bund ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Fair Item Allocation
Fair item allocation is a kind of a fair division problem in which the items to divide are ''discrete'' rather than continuous. The items have to be divided among several partners who value them differently, and each item has to be given as a whole to a single person. This situation arises in various real-life scenarios: * Several heirs want to divide the inherited property, which contains e.g. a house, a car, a piano and several paintings. * Several lecturers want to divide the courses given in their faculty. Each lecturer can teach one or more whole courses. *White elephant gift exchange parties The indivisibility of the items implies that a fair division may not be possible. As an extreme example, if there is only a single item (e.g. a house), it must be given to a single partner, but this is not fair to the other partners. This is in contrast to the fair cake-cutting problem, where the dividend is divisible and a fair division always exists. In some cases, the indivisibility pr ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Pareto-efficient
Pareto efficiency or Pareto optimality is a situation where no action or allocation is available that makes one individual better off without making another worse off. The concept is named after Vilfredo Pareto (1848–1923), Italian civil engineer and economist, who used the concept in his studies of economic efficiency and income distribution. The following three concepts are closely related: * Given an initial situation, a Pareto improvement is a new situation where some agents will gain, and no agents will lose. * A situation is called Pareto-dominated if there exists a possible Pareto improvement. * A situation is called Pareto-optimal or Pareto-efficient if no change could lead to improved satisfaction for some agent without some other agent losing or, equivalently, if there is no scope for further Pareto improvement. The Pareto front (also called Pareto frontier or Pareto set) is the set of all Pareto-efficient situations. Pareto originally used the word "optimal" for ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Rawlsian
John Bordley Rawls (; February 21, 1921 – November 24, 2002) was an American moral, legal and political philosopher in the liberal tradition. Rawls received both the Schock Prize for Logic and Philosophy and the National Humanities Medal in 1999, the latter presented by President Bill Clinton, in recognition of how Rawls's work "revived the disciplines of political and ethical philosophy with his argument that a society in which the most fortunate help the least fortunate is not only a moral society but a logical one". In 1990, Will Kymlicka wrote in his introduction to the field that "it is generally accepted that the recent rebirth of normative political philosophy began with the publication of John Rawls's ''A Theory of Justice'' in 1971". Rawls has often been described as one of the most influential political philosophers of the 20th century. He has the unusual distinction among contemporary political philosophers of being frequently cited by the courts of law in the Unite ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Envy-freeness
Envy-freeness, also known as no-envy, is a criterion for fair division. It says that, when resources are allocated among people with equal rights, each person should receive a share that is, in their eyes, at least as good as the share received by any other agent. In other words, no person should feel envy. General definitions Suppose a certain resource is divided among several agents, such that every agent i receives a share X_i. Every agent i has a personal preference relation \succeq_i over different possible shares. The division is called envy-free (EF) if for all i and j: :::X_i \succeq_i X_j Another term for envy-freeness is no-envy (NE). If the preference of the agents are represented by a value functions V_i, then this definition is equivalent to: :::V_i(X_i) \geq V_i(X_j) Put another way: we say that agent i ''envies'' agent j if i prefers the piece of j over his own piece, i.e.: :::X_i \prec_i X_j :::V_i(X_i) 2 the problem is much harder. See envy-free cake-cutting. ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Envy-free Item Assignment
Envy-free (EF) item allocation is a fair item allocation problem, in which the fairness criterion is envy-freeness - each agent should receive a bundle that they believe to be at least as good as the bundle of any other agent. Since the items are indivisible, an EF assignment may not exist. The simplest case is when there is a single item and at least two agents: if the item is assigned to one agent, the other will envy. One way to attain fairness is to use monetary transfers; see Fair allocation of items and money. When monetary transfers are not allowed or not desired, there are allocation algorithms providing various kinds of relaxations. Finding an envy-free allocation whenever it exists Preference-orderings on bundles: envy-freeness The undercut procedure finds a complete EF allocation for two agents, if-and-only-if such allocation exists. It requires the agents to rank bundles of items, but it does not require cardinal utility information. It works whenever the agents' ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Undercut Procedure
The undercut procedure is a procedure for fair item assignment between two people. It provably finds a complete envy-free item assignment whenever such assignment exists. It was presented by Brams and Kilgour and Klamler and simplified and extended by Aziz. Assumptions The undercut procedure requires only the following weak assumptions on the people: * Each person has a weak preference relation on subsets of items. * Each preference relation is ''strictly monotonic'': for every set X and item y\notin X, the person strictly prefers X\cup y to X. It is ''not'' assumed that agents have responsive preferences. Main idea The undercut procedure can be seen as a generalization of the divide and choose protocol from a divisible resource to a resource with indivisibilities. The divide-and-choose protocol requires one person to cut the resource to two equal pieces. But, if the resource contains with indivisibilities, it may be impossible to make an exactly-equal cut. Accordingly, the ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Envy-graph Procedure
The envy-graph procedure (also called the envy-cycles procedure) is a procedure for fair item allocation. It can be used by several people who want to divide among them several discrete items, such as heirlooms, sweets, or seats in a class. Ideally, we would like the allocation to be envy-free (EF). i.e., to give each agent a bundle that he/she prefers over the bundles of all other agents. However, the items are discrete and cannot be cut, so an envy-free assignment might be impossible (for example, consider a single item and two agents). The envy-graph procedure aims to achieve the "next-best" option -- ''envy-freeness up to at most a single good'' (EF1): it finds an allocation in which the envy of every person towards every other person is bounded by the maximum marginal utility it derives from a single item. In other words, for every two people ''i'' and ''j'', there exists an item such that, if that item is removed, ''i'' does not envy ''j''. The procedure was presented by Lip ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |