research-article

The complexity of fairness through equilibrium

Authors:

Abraham Othman,

Christos Papadimitriou,

Aviad RubinsteinAuthors Info & Claims

EC '14: Proceedings of the fifteenth ACM conference on Economics and computation

Pages 209 - 226

https://doi.org/10.1145/2600057.2602855

Published: 01 June 2014 Publication History

Abstract

Competitive equilibrium with equal incomes (CEEI) is a well-known fair allocation mechanism [Foley67:Resource, Varian74: Equity, Thomson85:Theories]; however, for indivisible resources a CEEI may not exist. It was shown in Budish [2011] that in the case of indivisible resources there is always an allocation, called A-CEEI, that is approximately fair, approximately truthful, and approximately efficient, for some favorable approximation parameters. This approximation is used in practice to assign business school students to classes. In this paper we show that finding the A-CEEI allocation guaranteed to exist by Budish's theorem is PPAD-complete. We further show that finding an approximate equilibrium with better approximation guarantees is even harder: NP-complete.

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Cited By

Jha TZick Y(2023)A Learning Framework for Distribution-Based Game-Theoretic Solution ConceptsACM Transactions on Economics and Computation10.1145/358037411:1-2(1-23)Online publication date: 24-Jun-2023
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3580374
Kurokawa DProcaccia AShah N(2018)Leximin Allocations in the Real WorldACM Transactions on Economics and Computation10.1145/32746416:3-4(1-24)Online publication date: 23-Oct-2018
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3274641
Budish ECachon GKessler JOthman A(2017)Course MatchOperations Research10.1287/opre.2016.154465:2(314-336)Online publication date: 1-Apr-2017
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1287/opre.2016.1544
Show More Cited By

Index Terms

The complexity of fairness through equilibrium
1. Applied computing
  1. Law, social and behavioral sciences
    1. Economics
2. Theory of computation
  1. Design and analysis of algorithms

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cover image ACM Conferences

EC '14: Proceedings of the fifteenth ACM conference on Economics and computation

June 2014

1028 pages

ISBN:9781450325653

DOI:10.1145/2600057

General Chair:
Moshe Babaioff
Microsoft Research
,
Program Chairs:
Vincent Conitzer
Duke University
,
David Easley
Cornell University

Copyright © 2014 ACM.

Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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Published: 01 June 2014

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June 8 - 12, 2014

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EC '14 Paper Acceptance Rate 80 of 290 submissions, 28%;

Overall Acceptance Rate 664 of 2,389 submissions, 28%

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Cited By

Jha TZick Y(2023)A Learning Framework for Distribution-Based Game-Theoretic Solution ConceptsACM Transactions on Economics and Computation10.1145/358037411:1-2(1-23)Online publication date: 24-Jun-2023
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3580374
Kurokawa DProcaccia AShah N(2018)Leximin Allocations in the Real WorldACM Transactions on Economics and Computation10.1145/32746416:3-4(1-24)Online publication date: 23-Oct-2018
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3274641
Budish ECachon GKessler JOthman A(2017)Course MatchOperations Research10.1287/opre.2016.154465:2(314-336)Online publication date: 1-Apr-2017
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1287/opre.2016.1544
Friedman EPsomas CVardi SDaskalakis CBabaioff MMoulin H(2017)Controlled Dynamic Fair DivisionProceedings of the 2017 ACM Conference on Economics and Computation10.1145/3033274.3085123(461-478)Online publication date: 20-Jun-2017
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3033274.3085123
Brânzei SLv YMehta R(2016)To give or not to giveProceedings of the Twenty-Fifth International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence10.5555/3060621.3060639(123-129)Online publication date: 9-Jul-2016
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.5555/3060621.3060639
Babichenko YPapadimitriou CRubinstein ASudan M(2016)Can Almost Everybody be Almost Happy?Proceedings of the 2016 ACM Conference on Innovations in Theoretical Computer Science10.1145/2840728.2840731(1-9)Online publication date: 14-Jan-2016
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/2840728.2840731
Bouveret SLemaître M(2016)Characterizing conflicts in fair division of indivisible goods using a scale of criteriaAutonomous Agents and Multi-Agent Systems10.1007/s10458-015-9287-330:2(259-290)Online publication date: 1-Mar-2016
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1007/s10458-015-9287-3
Kurokawa DProcaccia AShah NRoughgarden TFeldman MSchwarz M(2015)Leximin Allocations in the Real WorldProceedings of the Sixteenth ACM Conference on Economics and Computation10.1145/2764468.2764490(345-362)Online publication date: 15-Jun-2015
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/2764468.2764490
Cole RGkatzelis VServedio RRubinfeld R(2015)Approximating the Nash Social Welfare with Indivisible ItemsProceedings of the forty-seventh annual ACM symposium on Theory of Computing10.1145/2746539.2746589(371-380)Online publication date: 14-Jun-2015
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/2746539.2746589
Rubinstein AServedio RRubinfeld R(2015)Inapproximability of Nash EquilibriumProceedings of the forty-seventh annual ACM symposium on Theory of Computing10.1145/2746539.2746578(409-418)Online publication date: 14-Jun-2015
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/2746539.2746578
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