How to Resolve Envy by Adding Goods

TL;DR

This paper investigates how adding goods can eliminate envy in allocations, providing a characterization, a polynomial-time algorithm for certain cases, and a complexity analysis showing intractability when bounds are imposed.

Contribution

It offers a novel characterization of envy resolution via adding goods and develops a polynomial-time algorithm for these cases, along with a parameterized complexity analysis.

Findings

Polynomial-time algorithm for envy resolution by adding goods when possible

Characterization of instances where envy can be resolved by adding arbitrary copies

Intractability results when bounding the number of added items or copies

Abstract

We consider the problem of resolving the envy of a given initial allocation by adding elements from a pool of goods. We give a characterization of the instances where envy can be resolved by adding an arbitrary number of copies of the items in the pool. From this characterization, we derive a polynomial-time algorithm returning a respective solution if it exists. If the number of copies or the total number of added items are bounded, the problem becomes computationally intractable even in various restricted cases. We perform a parameterized complexity analysis, focusing on the number of agents and the pool size as parameters. Notably, although not every instance admits an envy-free solution, our approach allows us to efficiently determine, in polynomial time, whether a solution exists-an aspect that is both theoretically interesting and far from trivial.