Fair Allocation

Professor Jay Sethuraman

ABSTRACT

We consider the problem of allocating a set of indivisible objects (say, houses) to agents in a fair and efficient manner. This fundamental resource allocation problem arises in many applications, and several versions have been studied in the literature. We study a model in which agents express preferences over objects (indifferences allowed), and the mechanism must use only this "ordinal'' information. By viewing the objects as continuously divisible entities, we propose an algorithm for this problem that computes a fair and efficient (random) assignment.

(This is joint work with Akshay-Kumar Katta of Columbia University)