Symmetrically Fair Allocations of Indivisible Goods

TL;DR

This paper introduces the concept of symmetrically envy free up to one good (symEF1) allocations for indivisible goods, providing new theoretical bounds, existence conditions, and computational insights into fair division.

Contribution

It develops the theory of symEF1 allocations, proves their existence under certain graph partition conditions, and explores their abundance and computational aspects.

Findings

SymEF1 allocations exist when related graph vertices can be partitioned into independent sets.

Existence of symEF1 is guaranteed for two agents and specific valuation types.

Computational experiments show how often symEF1 allocations occur with random valuations.

Abstract

We consider allocating indivisible goods with provable fairness guarantees that are satisfied regardless of which bundle of items each agent receives. Symmetrical allocations of this type are known to exist for divisible resources, such as consensus splitting of a cake into parts, each having equal value for all agents, ensuring that in any allocation of the cake slices, no agent would envy another. For indivisible goods, one analogous concept relaxes envy freeness to guarantee the existence of an allocation in which any bundle is worth as much as any other, up to the value of a bounded number of items from the other bundle. Previous work has studied the number of items that need to be removed. In this paper, we improve upon these bounds for the specific setting in which the number of bundles equals the number of agents. Concretely, we develop the theory of symmetrically envy free up to one good, or symEF1, allocations. We prove that a symEF1 allocation exists if the vertices of a related graph can be partitioned (colored) into as many independent sets as there are agents. This sufficient condition always holds for two agents, and for agents that have identical, disjoint, or binary valuations. We further prove conditions under which exponentially-many distinct symEF1 allocations exist. Finally, we perform computational experiments to study the incidence of symEF1 allocations as a function of the number of agents and items when valuations are drawn uniformly at random.