Group-Fair Metric Distortion of Facility Assignment Problems

Abstract

We study the group-fair distortion of metric facility assignment problems, where a set of agents, partitioned into unknown groups, must be assigned to a collection of facilities, possibly subject to capacity or other feasibility constraints. Given an assignment, each agent incurs a cost that depends on both its distance to its assigned facility and, via an affinity factor, the average distance of the other members in its group to their assigned facilities. We consider full-information algorithms, which have complete knowledge of the metric space, and ordinal-information algorithms, which know the distances between facilities and only the rankings of the agents over facilities (sorted by increasing distance). We establish worst-case distortion upper bounds in terms of the Max-of-Sum and Sum-of-Max social objectives, which combine the classic utilitarian and egalitarian social cost measures. We also derive informational lower bounds for one-sided matching and clustering, two fundamental and well-studied problems captured by our model, that match our upper bounds exactly for Max-of-Sum and asymptotically for Sum-of-Max.