The Probabilistic Serial and Random Priority Mechanisms with Minimum Quotas

TL;DR

This paper extends the Probabilistic Serial and Random Priority mechanisms to handle objects with minimum and maximum quotas, maintaining key fairness and strategy-proofness properties in the presence of quotas.

Contribution

It introduces a novel generalization of PS and RP mechanisms that incorporate minimum quotas, preserving their core properties in quota-constrained settings.

Findings

PS remains ordinally efficient, envy-free, and weakly strategy-proof.

RP is strategy-proof and weakly envy-free but not ordinally efficient.

The mechanisms ensure feasible assignments satisfying all quotas.

Abstract

Consider the problem of assigning indivisible objects to agents with strict ordinal preferences over objects, where each agent is interested in consuming at most one object, and objects have integer minimum and maximum quotas. We define an assignment to be feasible if it satisfies all quotas and assume such an assignment always exists. The Probabilistic Serial (PS) and Random Priority (RP) mechanisms are generalised based on the same intuitive idea: Allow agents to consume their most preferred available object until the total mass of agents yet to be allocated is exactly equal to the remaining amount of unfilled lower quotas; in this case, we restrict agents' menus to objects which are yet to fill their minimum quotas. We show the mechanisms satisfy the same criteria as their classical counterparts: PS is ordinally efficient, envy-free and weakly strategy-proof; RP is strategy-proof, weakly envy-free but not ordinally efficient.