Which Is the Fairest (Rent Division) of Them All?

What is a fair way to assign rooms to several housemates, and divide the rent between them? This is not just a theoretical question: many people have used the Spliddit website to obtain envy-free solutions to rent division instances. But envy freeness, in and of itself, is insufficient to guarantee...

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Publicado en:Communications of the ACM Vol. 61; no. 2; pp. 93 - 101
Autores principales: Gal, Kobi, Procaccia, Ariel D., Mash, Moshe, Zick, Yair
Formato: Artículo
Publicado: Association for Computing Machinery Feb2018
Materias:
Acceso en línea:Ver este registro en EBSCOhost
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        atl: Which Is the Fairest (Rent Division) of Them All?
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          Gal, Kobi
          Procaccia, Ariel D.
          Mash, Moshe
          Zick, Yair
        affil:
          Dept. of Software and Information Systems Engineering, Ben-Gurion University, Beer-Sheva, Israel
          Computer Science Department, Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, PA, USA
          School of Computing, National University of Singapore
      su:
        Rent
        Algorithms
        Fairness
        Program transformation
        Computer programming
        Computer software
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        subj:
          Rent
          Algorithms
          Fairness
          Program transformation
          Computer programming
          Computer software
      ab: What is a fair way to assign rooms to several housemates, and divide the rent between them? This is not just a theoretical question: many people have used the Spliddit website to obtain envy-free solutions to rent division instances. But envy freeness, in and of itself, is insufficient to guarantee outcomes that people view as intuitive and acceptable. We therefore focus on solutions that optimize a criterion of social justice, subject to the envy freeness constraint, in order to pinpoint the "fairest" solutions. We develop a general algorithmic framework that enables the computation of such solutions in polynomial time. We then study the relations between natural optimization objectives, and identify the maximin solution, which maximizes the minimum utility subject to envy freeness, as the most attractive. We demonstrate, using experiments on real data from Spliddit, that the maximin solution gives rise to significant gains in terms of our optimization objectives. Finally, a user study with Spliddit users as subjects demonstrates that people find the maximin solution to be significantly fairer than arbitrary envy-free solutions; this user study is unprecedented in that it asks people about their real-world rent division instances. Based on these results, the maximin solution has been deployed on Spliddit since April 2015.
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    language: English
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