A General Framework for Fair Allocation under Matroid Rank Valuations

We study the problem of fairly allocating a set of indivisible goods among agents with matroid rank valuations: Every good provides a marginal value of 0 or 1 when added to a bundle and valuations are submodular. We present a simple algorithmic framework, called General Yankee Swap , that can efficiently compute allocations that maximize any justice criterion (or fairness objective) satisfying some mild assumptions. Along with maximizing a justice criterion, General Yankee Swap is guaranteed to maximize utilitarian social welfare, ensure strategyproofness, and use at most a quadratic number of valuation queries. We show how General Yankee Swap can be used to compute allocations for five different well-studied justice criteria: (a) Prioritized Lorenz dominance, (b) Maximin fairness, (c) Weighted leximin, (d) Max weighted Nash welfare, and (e) Max weighted p -mean welfare. In particular, this framework provides the first polynomial time algorithms to compute weighted leximin, max weighted Nash welfare, and max weighted p -mean welfare allocations for agents with matroid rank valuations. We also extend this framework to the setting of binary chores—items with marginal values -1 or 0—and similarly show that it can be used to maximize any justice criteria satisfying some mild assumptions.

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Publication Details

Journal
ACM Transactions on Economics and Computation
Published
2025-04-04
DOI
https://doi.org/10.1145/3728367
Primary Topic
Game Theory and Voting Systems
Type
article
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article

A General Framework for Fair Allocation under Matroid Rank Valuations

Yair Zick, Vignesh Viswanathan
ACM Transactions on Economics and Computation
Game Theory and Voting Systems
article

A General Framework for Fair Allocation under Matroid Rank Valuations

Yair Zick, Vignesh Viswanathan
article en

Abstract

We study the problem of fairly allocating a set of indivisible goods among agents with matroid rank valuations: Every good provides a marginal value of 0 or 1 when added to a bundle and valuations are submodular. We present a simple algorithmic framework, called General Yankee Swap , that can efficiently compute allocations that maximize any justice criterion (or fairness objective) satisfying some mild assumptions. Along with maximizing a justice criterion, General Yankee Swap is guaranteed to maximize utilitarian social welfare, ensure strategyproofness, and use at most a quadratic number of valuation queries. We show how General Yankee Swap can be used to compute allocations for five different well-studied justice criteria: (a) Prioritized Lorenz dominance, (b) Maximin fairness, (c) Weighted leximin, (d) Max weighted Nash welfare, and (e) Max weighted p -mean welfare. In particular, this framework provides the first polynomial time algorithms to compute weighted leximin, max weighted Nash welfare, and max weighted p -mean welfare allocations for agents with matroid rank valuations. We also extend this framework to the setting of binary chores—items with marginal values -1 or 0—and similarly show that it can be used to maximize any justice criteria satisfying some mild assumptions.

ACM Transactions on Economics and ComputationVol. 13(3)
Amherst College (US), University of Massachusetts Amherst (US)
Openalex Percentile: Top 90%
Game Theory and Voting Systems
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