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Temporal fair division [1] [2] is a sequence of fair division instances among the same set of agents. Some examples are:
The standard fair division setting considers a one-shot division; but in reality, the same set of agents usually participate in several consecutive fair division instances. This adds more complexity to the fairness requirements.
In some cases, the resources to allocate are not known in advance. Each day, a new resource (or set of resources) arrives, and must be immediately and irrevocably allocated. Fairness becomes much harder to attain, as the allocator might make an allocation decision that will in hindsight appear very unfair. This setting is explained in the page on online fair division.
This article focuses on the setting in which the resources to allocate are all known in advance: we know exactly what is going to arrive and when. The challenge here is that, in a sequence of fair division instances, people have higher fairness expectations. While they agree to tolerate a slightly unfair allocation in a single day, they expect the fairness to be restored in following days. This gives rise to stronger fairness notions, that take the temporal nature of the problem into consideration.
It is common to call each instance in the sequence a "round" or a "day", though of course it is possible that the instances occur at different time-intervals.
Fairness notions. Let F be any fairness notion defined for a one-shot division setting. For example, F can be envy-freeness (EF), envy-freeness up to one item (EF1), proportionality (PROP), and so on. F can be generalized to temporal fair division in three different ways: [1]
Note that Cumulative-F impies Overall-F. However, Local-F is independent of these two. Local-F alone and Overall-F alone can be obtained by any standard (non-temporal) allocation that obtains F; the challenges are threefold:
Remark. When studying cumulative fairness, it is usually assumed that there is a single item per day. [2] : Lem.3.1 This is because, for any instance with e.g. k items per day, one can create an instance with a single item per day (essentially "split" each day into k consecutive days), and if the new instance admits a cumulative-F allocation, then so does the original instance.
Repeated fair division [3] is a special case of temporal fair division in which the items are the same in each period. This setting allows for stronger fairness guarantees.
Repeated matching [4] is a special case of repeated fair division in which there are n items in each round, and each agent should exactly one item per round. An example of this setting is housechore allocation: each day, each housemate must do exactly one chore, and the chores are the same each day. Some fairness notions are easy to attain in this setting:
Caragiannis and Narang [4] study a generalized repeated matching setting in which the value of an agent for an item may depend on the number of rounds the item was previously used by the same agent. In this setting, attaining overall-EF1 becomes more challenging, and the round-robin technique does not work. For example, suppose there are two agents, two items and three rounds. Suppose that:
In round-robin, Alice will choose three copies of x and George will choose three copies of y; both agents end up envying each other, and the overall allocation is not even EF1. They show that:
Micheel and Wilczynski [6] also study repeated matching (which they call "repeated house allocation"). They assume that agents have ordinal preferences over the houses, which do not change between rounds. They measure the cumulative envy - the envy after each time-step (not just at the end). They also require that the allocation at each round be Pareto efficient. They also take into account past rounds - rounds that occurred before the algorithm starts. They study three fairness notions:
It remains open whether a cumulative-EF1 allocation always exists. Interestingly, in some cases there exists a cumulative-EF1 allocation but no repetitive cumulative-EF1 allocation. For any n≥3, it is NP-hard to decide whether there exists a repetitive cumulative-EF1 allocation, even for T=2 rounds, by reduction from Multiway number partitioning. [2] : Thm.5.2
In the more general repeated allocation setting, there can be more or fewer than n items each day, and every agent may receive any number of items each day.
Igarashi, Lackner, Nardi and Novaro [3] study both overall fairness and per-round (local) fairness. They consider two settings: the number of rounds can be either fixed in advance, or variable (can be chosen by the algorithm). The prove that:
Cookson, Ebadian and Shah [1] strengthen their results to ordinal fairness (fairness that holds for any utility functions compatible with the rankings). They show polynomial time algorithms that guarantee the following combinations:
The more general case of temporal division is when the items in each day may be different (but it still known in advance what items are coming). Cumulative-EF1 is the main fairness notion.
A first solution that comes to mind is to use the envy-graph procedure, that is, each day, the daily item is allocated to an unenvied agent. The partial allocation is always EF1. However, in case there is envy-cycle, we must exchange bundles along the cycle, which destroys the cumulative-EF1 guarantee.[ clarification needed ] Still, the envy-graph procedure works when agents have identical valuations, as in this case no envy-cycles are formed.
He, Procaccia and Psomas [7] show a polytime algorithm that attains cumulative-EF1 for two agents with positive valuations (goods). It is similar to the envy-graph algorithm except that, when envy-cycles occur, only partial bundles are exchanged, in a way that maintains the cumulative-EF1 guarantee. An analogous algorithm works with negative valuations (chores). [2] : Sec.3.1
With three or more agents, it may be impossible to attain cumulative-EF1 without reallocating previously-allocating items (moreover, Ω(T) reallocations might be required). [7] There is an example with three agents and 23 goods; the example does not extend to chores, so the case of chores and 3 or more agents remains open. [2] : App.A
Elkind, Lam, Latifian, Neoh and Teh [2] : Sec.3.2 show some more cases (in addition to the case of two agents) in which a cumulative-EF1 (TEF1) allocation always exists, and can be found in polytime:
On the other hand, they show that a cumulative-EFx allocation might not exist for either goods or chores, even for two agents with identical valuations and two types of items, and even when the values are increasing with time (for goods) or decreasing with time (for chores). [2] : Sec.3.1
For the general case, they prove several hardness results regarding cumulative-EF1: [2] : Sec.3.3
There are also several hardness results regarding combining cumulative-EF1 with Pareto-efficiency: [2] : Sec.4
Cookson, Ebadian and Shah [1] study temporal fair division with an additional requirements of ordinal fairness (which means that the fairness notion should hold for any additive utility function that is compatible with the ranking). They show polytime algorithms for the following combinations of features:
The following table summarizes results for indivisible item allocation. Results are presented by the characteristics of the single-day problem (what is done each day), and the temporal aspects (what relates problems solved in different days).
Information on future can be:
The Adversary models are based on Zeng and Psomas: [14]
Name+Cite | Single-day problem | Temporal aspects | Comments | ||||||||||
---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
#Items | #Agents | Valuations | Per-day fairness | Information on future | Identical days? | Adversary | Overall fairness at round T | Cumulative fairness | |||||
LIKE [15] | 1 | n | Binary | - | 1 Max value | 0 Different | 5 Adaptive | ex-ante EF. | Truthful. Not ex-post EFc for any c. | ||||
BALANCED LIKE [15] | 1 | n | Binary | - | 1 Max value | 0 Different | 5 Adaptive | ex-ante EF, ex-post EF1. | Truthful for n≥2 but not for n≥3. | ||||
Derandomized LIKE [16] | 1 | n | Additive | - | 1 Max value | 0 Different | 5 Adaptive | Envy ≤ sqrt(T/n). | - | Envy bound is tight. | |||
Derandomized LIKE with batches [16] [17] : Sec.3.1-3.2 | m | n | Additive | - | 1 Max value | 0 Different | 5 Adaptive | Envy ≤ sqrt(T/(mn)). | - | Envy bound is tight. | |||
Online Stripe Discrepancy [18] | 1 | 2 | Additive | - | 1 Max value | 0 Different | 1 IID | Envy ≤ T^(const/log log T), w.h.p. | - | Holds even for ordinal envy. | |||
Clique Rounding [14] : Alg.3 [17] : Sec.4 | 1 | n | Additive | - | 1 Max value | 0 Different | 3 Correlated (hence also 1,2) | Ex-post PE; every pair (i,j) satisfies either EF1, or EF w.h.p. | - | Fairness guarantee cannot be improved even for adversary 1 (IID). | |||
*** | 1 | n | Additive | - | 1 Max value | 0 Different | 4 Non-adaptive (hence also 5) | Envy in o(T); 1/n-PE. | - | Impossible. | |||
Envy Balancing [19] : Alg.2 | 1 | 2 | Additive | - | 3 Complete | 0 Different | 5 Adaptive | EF1 | - | Requires no adjustments. | |||
Fractional Item Rounding [19] : Alg.1 | 1 | 2 | Additive | - | 0 None | 0 Different | 5 Adaptive | EF1 | - | Requires at most T adjustments. | |||
Double Round Robin [19] : Alg.3 | 1 | n | Additive | - | 0 None | 0 Different | 5 Adaptive | EF1 | - | Requires O(T3/2) adjustments. | |||
*** [Impossibility result] [19] : Thm.4.2 | 1 | n | Additive | - | 3 Complete (hence also 0,1,2) | 0 Different | 4 Non-adaptive (hence also 5) | EF1 | - | Requires Omega(T) adjustments. | |||
Repeated fair allocation for two agents [20] : Sec.4 | m | 2 | Additive | Weak-EF1 | 3 Complete | 1 Identical | - | EF+PE (when T is even). | Per-round EF1 for T=2 days | ||||
Repeated fair allocation for n agents [20] : Sec.3 | m | n | Additive | None | 3 Complete | 1 Identical | - | EF or PROP+PE (when T is a multiple of n). | Impossible when T is not a multiple of n. EF+PE impossible for n>2. | ||||
Repeated matching - time-dependent valuations [21] | n | n | Additive; Item value for i can depend on number of times it is used by i. | EF1 (trivial) | 3 Complete | 1 Identical | - | EF1 | None | ||||
Repeated matching [21] | n | n | Additive | EF1 (trivial) | 3 Complete | 1 Identical | - | EF1 | None | Biswas-Barman algorithm for partition-matroid constraints | |||
Envy-graph [2] : Sec.3.2 | m | n | Additive, Generalized-binary | None | 0 None (hence also 1, 2, 3) | 0 Different | - | EF1 | There is always an unenvied agent; no need to remove cycles. | ||||
*** [Impossibility result] [22] : Sec.3 | 1 | ≥ 2 | Additive | - | 0 None | 0 Different | 5 Adaptive | EF1 | - | Any multiplicative approximation of EF1 is impossible | |||
*** [Impossibility result] [22] : Sec.3 | 1 | 2 | Additive | - | 0 None | 0 Different | 5 Adaptive | PROP1 | - | PROP1 is impossible | |||
Satisficing algorithm [22] : Sec.4 | 1 | n | Additive | - | 1 Sum values | 0 Different | 5 Adaptive | PROP1; EF1 for n=2 | - | EFx impossible for n≥2; EF1 impossible for n≥3. | |||
Picking-sequence algorithm [22] : Sec.5 | 1 | n | Additive | - | 2 Multiset | 0 Different | 5 Adaptive | Every share-based notion; and EFx for n=2 | - | Cannot guarantee EFx for n≥3. |
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