Weighted Fair Division: Additive Preferences and Beyond

September 17, 2024 3:30 PM Singapore (Registration starts at 3:20 PM)

Abstract

Fair resource allocation is a fundamental problem in society, with applications ranging from inheritance division to ministry allocation. While the fair division literature typically assumes that all agents have the same entitlement to the resource, several practical applications involve agents with varying entitlements represented by weights. I will present the highlights of my work on weighted fair division of indivisible resources, which include (i) adapting standard fairness notions such as envy-freeness and proportionality to the weighted setting; (ii) generalizing prominent allocation algorithms such as picking sequences and maximum Nash welfare to incorporate weights; and (iii) analyzing algorithms with respect to axiomatic properties including fairness, monotonicity, and strategyproofness. I will also discuss the progress and challenges of extending the results beyond additive preferences.

(Based on joint work with Mithun Chakraborty, Ayumi Igarashi, Luisa Montanari, Ulrike Schmidt-Kraepelin, Erel Segal-Halevi, Nicholas Teh, and Yair Zick)

About the Speaker

Warut Suksompong is an assistant professor in the School of Computing at the National University of Singapore. He completed his PhD at Stanford University and was a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Oxford. His research interests include algorithmic game theory, mechanism design, social choice theory, and other problems at the interface between computer science, economics, mathematics, and operations research. He is a recipient of the IJCAI 2021 Distinguished Paper Award, the WINE 2021 Best Student Paper Award, the IJCAI 2024 Early Career Spotlight, the NUS Faculty Teaching Excellence Award, and the NUS Presidential Young Professorship.