Efficient Reallocation under Additive and Responsive Preferences

TL;DR

This paper investigates the computational complexity of checking Pareto optimality in resource reallocation problems under additive and ordinal preferences, providing algorithms and characterizations for different preference restrictions.

Contribution

It offers new polynomial-time algorithms and complexity results for testing Pareto optimality under various preference models in resource allocation.

Findings

Polynomial algorithms for additive utilities with restricted preferences

Hardness results for general additive utility cases

Characterizations for possible and necessary Pareto optimality with ordinal preferences

Abstract

Reallocating resources to get mutually beneficial outcomes is a fundamental problem in various multi-agent settings. While finding an arbitrary Pareto optimal allocation is generally easy, checking whether a particular allocation is Pareto optimal can be much more difficult. This problem is equivalent to checking that the allocated objects cannot be reallocated in such a way that at least one agent prefers her new share to his old one, and no agent prefers her old share to her new one. We consider the problem for two related types of preference relations over sets of objects. In the first part of the paper we focus on the setting in which agents express additive cardinal utilities over objects. We present computational hardness results as well as polynomial-time algorithms for testing Pareto optimality under different restrictions such as two utility values or lexicographic utilities. In the second part of the paper we assume that agents express only their (ordinal) preferences over single objects, and that their preferences are additively separable. In this setting, we present characterizations and polynomial-time algorithms for possible and necessary Pareto optimality.