Distribution of Chores with Information Asymmetry

Hadi Hosseini; Joshua Kavner; Tomasz Wąs; Lirong Xia

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arXiv · 2305.02986

Distribution of Chores with Information Asymmetry

Hadi Hosseini·Joshua Kavner·Tomasz Wąs·Lirong Xia

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Abstract

A well-regarded fairness notion when dividing indivisible chores is envy-freeness up to one item (EF1), which requires that pairwise envy can be eliminated by the removal of a single item. While an EF1 and Pareto optimal (PO) allocation of goods can always be found via well-known algorithms, even the existence of such solutions for chores remains open, to date. We take an epistemic approach utilizing information asymmetry by introducing dubious chores--items that inflict no cost on receiving agents but are perceived costly by others. On a technical level, dubious chores provide a more fine-grained approximation of envy-freeness than EF1. We show that finding allocations with minimal number of dubious chores is computationally hard. Nonetheless, we prove the existence of envy-free and fractional PO allocations for $n$ agents with only $2n-2$ dubious chores and strengthen it to $n-1$ dubious chores in four special classes of valuations. Our experimental analysis demonstrates that often only a few dubious chores are needed to achieve envy-freeness.

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Hadi Hosseini, Joshua Kavner, Tomasz Wąs, Lirong Xia. 2023-05-04. Distribution of Chores with Information Asymmetry. https://arxiv.org/abs/2305.02986

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