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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] |
Fair Item Assignment
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] |
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] |
Preference (economics)
In economics and other social sciences, preference is the order that an agent gives to alternatives based on their relative utility. A process which results in an "optimal choice" (whether real or theoretical). Preferences are evaluations and concern matters of value, typically in relation to practical reasoning. The character of the preferences is determined purely by a person's tastes instead of the good's prices, personal income, and the availability of goods. However, people are still expected to act in their best (rational) interest. Rationality, in this context, means that when individuals are faced with a choice, they would select the option that maximizes self-interest. Moreover, in every set of alternatives, preferences arise. The belief of preference plays a key role in many disciplines, including moral philosophy and decision theory. The logical properties that preferences possess have major effects also on rational choice theory, which has a carryover effect on all mode ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Responsive Preferences
In utility theory, the responsive set (RS) extension is an extension of a preference-relation on individual items, to a partial preference-relation of item-bundles. Example Suppose there are four items: w,x,y,z. A person states that he ranks the items according to the following total order: :w \prec x \prec y \prec z (i.e., z is his best item, then y, then x, then w). Assuming the items are independent goods, one can deduce that: :\ \prec \ – the person prefers his two best items to his two worst items; :\ \prec \ – the person prefers his best and third-best items to his second-best and fourth-best items. But, one cannot deduce anything about the bundles \, \; we do not know which of them the person prefers. The RS extension of the ranking w \prec x \prec y \prec z is a partial order on the bundles of items, that includes all relations that can be deduced from the item-ranking and the independence assumption. Definitions Let O be a set of objects and \preceq a total order ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Divide And Choose
Divide and choose (also Cut and choose or I cut, you choose) is a procedure for fair division of a continuous resource, such as a cake, between two parties. It involves a heterogeneous good or resource ("the cake") and two partners who have different preferences over parts of the cake. The protocol proceeds as follows: one person ("the cutter") cuts the cake into two pieces; the other person ("the chooser") selects one of the pieces; the cutter receives the remaining piece. The procedure has been used since ancient times to divide land, cake and other resources between two parties. Currently, there is an entire field of research, called fair cake-cutting, devoted to various extensions and generalizations of cut-and-choose. History Divide and choose is mentioned in the Bible, in the Book of Genesis (chapter 13). When Abraham and Lot come to the land of Canaan, Abraham suggests that they divide it among them. Then Abraham, coming from the south, divides the land to a "left" (western) ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Partition Problem
In number theory and computer science, the partition problem, or number partitioning, is the task of deciding whether a given multiset ''S'' of positive integers can be partitioned into two subsets ''S''1 and ''S''2 such that the sum of the numbers in ''S''1 equals the sum of the numbers in ''S''2. Although the partition problem is NP-complete, there is a pseudo-polynomial time dynamic programming solution, and there are heuristics that solve the problem in many instances, either optimally or approximately. For this reason, it has been called "the easiest hard problem". There is an optimization version of the partition problem, which is to partition the multiset ''S'' into two subsets ''S''1, ''S''2 such that the difference between the sum of elements in ''S''1 and the sum of elements in ''S''2 is minimized. The optimization version is NP-hard, but can be solved efficiently in practice. The partition problem is a special case of two related problems: * In the subset sum problem, ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Independent Goods
Independent goods are goods that have a zero cross elasticity of demand. Changes in the price of one good will have no effect on the demand for an independent good. Thus independent goods are neither complements nor substitutes. For example, a person's demand for nails is usually independent of his or her demand for bread, since they are two unrelated types of goods. Note that this concept is subjective and depends on the consumer's personal utility function. A Cobb-Douglas utility function implies that goods are independent. For goods in quantities ''X''1 and ''X''2, prices ''p''1 and ''p''2, income ''m'', and utility function parameter ''a'', the utility function : u(X_1, X_2) = X_1^a X_2^, when optimized subject to the budget constraint that expenditure on the two goods cannot exceed income, gives rise to this demand function for good 1: X_1= am/p_1, which does not depend on ''p''2. See also * Consumer theory * Good (economics and accounting) In economics, goods are i ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Weakly Additive
In fair division, a topic in economics, a preference relation is weakly additive if the following condition is met: : If A is preferred to B, and C is preferred to D (and the contents of A and C do not overlap) then A together with C is preferable to B together with D. Every additive utility function is weakly-additive. However, additivity is applicable only to cardinal utility functions, while weak additivity is applicable to ordinal utility functions. Weak additivity is often a realistic assumption when dividing up goods between claimants, and simplifies the mathematics of certain fair division problems considerably. Some procedures in fair division do not need the value of goods to be additive and only require weak additivity. In particular the adjusted winner procedure only requires weak additivity. Cases where weak additivity fails Case where the assumptions might fail would be either *The value of A and C together is the less than the sum of their values. For instance ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
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] |
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] |
