Group Envy Freeness and Group Pareto Efficiency in Fair Division with Indivisible Items

TL;DR

This paper introduces and analyzes the concepts of group envy-freeness and group Pareto efficiency in fair division of indivisible items, extending classical fairness notions to groups and exploring their properties, existence, and trade-offs.

Contribution

It generalizes envy-freeness and Pareto efficiency to groups, proposes new fairness taxonomies, and examines the existence and trade-offs of these properties in group settings.

Findings

Group envy-freeness and Pareto efficiency are extended to fixed-size groups.

Near versions of group properties are studied due to potential non-existence.

Three prices of group fairness are analyzed across different social welfare functions.

Abstract

We study the fair division of items to agents supposing that agents can form groups. We thus give natural generalizations of popular concepts such as envy-freeness and Pareto efficiency to groups of fixed sizes. Group envy-freeness requires that no group envies another group. Group Pareto efficiency requires that no group can be made better off without another group be made worse off. We study these new group properties from an axiomatic viewpoint. We thus propose new fairness taxonomies that generalize existing taxonomies. We further study near versions of these group properties as allocations for some of them may not exist. We finally give three prices of group fairness between group properties for three common social welfares (i.e. utilitarian, egalitarian, and Nash).