A Mechanism for Fair Distribution of Resources without Payments
Evgenia Christoforou, Antonio Fern\'andez Anta, Agust\'in Santos

TL;DR
This paper introduces FEDoR, a payment-free mechanism for fair, truthful, and efficient resource distribution among strategic agents over multiple rounds, leveraging statistical tests to ensure fairness and punish misreporting.
Contribution
The paper presents FEDoR, a novel mechanism that achieves truthfulness and fairness without payments in repeated resource allocation settings with strategic agents.
Findings
FEDoR ensures fairness in expectation over multiple rounds.
FEDoR can be applied to various domains like bandwidth sharing and sponsored search.
FEDoR outperforms traditional payment-based mechanisms in certain scenarios.
Abstract
We design a mechanism for Fair and Efficient Distribution of Resources (FEDoR) in the presence of strategic agents. We consider a multiple-instances, Bayesian setting, where in each round the preference of an agent over the set of resources is a private information. We assume that in each of r rounds n agents are competing for k non-identical indivisible goods, (n > k). In each round the strategic agents declare how much they value receiving any of the goods in the specific round. The agent declaring the highest valuation receives the good with the highest value, the agent with the second highest valuation receives the second highest valued good, etc. Hence we assume a decision function that assigns goods to agents based on their valuations. The novelty of the mechanism is that no payment scheme is required to achieve truthfulness in a setting with rational/strategic agents. The FEDoR…
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