Generalized Rental Harmony

TL;DR

This paper extends the Rental Harmony problem to a broader class of tenant preferences by adapting Sperner's lemma, unifying previous models and enabling the application of recent results to more general scenarios.

Contribution

It introduces a generalized preference model for Rental Harmony and adapts Sperner's lemma-based techniques to this broader context, unifying previous assumptions.

Findings

The generalized model encompasses both miserly and quasilinear preferences.

Recent results for miserly tenants now apply to the broader class.

The adaptation broadens the applicability of existing rental harmony solutions.

Abstract

Rental Harmony is the problem of assigning rooms in a rented house to tenants with different preferences, and simultaneously splitting the rent among them, such that no tenant envies the bundle (room+price) given to another tenant. Different papers have studied this problem under two incompatible assumptions: the miserly tenants assumption is that each tenant prefers a free room to a non-free room; the quasilinear tenants assumption is that each tenant attributes a monetary value to each room, and prefers a room of which the difference between value and price is maximum. This note shows how to adapt the main technique used for rental harmony with miserly tenants, using Sperner's lemma, to a much more general class of preferences, that contains both miserly and quasilinear tenants as special cases. This implies that some recent results derived for miserly tenants apply to this more general preference class too.