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Fair Societies: Algorithms for House Allocations

2025/11/10 by Hadi Hosseini, Sanjukta Roy, Hosseini, Hadi +3
Computer Science · Decision Sciences · Economics, Econometrics and Finance · #Auction Theory and Applications #Computer Science and Game Theory (cs.GT) #FOS: Computer and information sciences #Game Theory and Voting Systems #Mobile Crowdsensing and Crowdsourcing

paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.2511.07022

openalex publication_date 2025/11/10 · openalex created_date 2025/11/12 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28

Abstract

House Allocations concern with matchings involving one-sided preferences, where houses serve as a proxy encoding valuable indivisible resources (e.g. organs, course seats, subsidized public housing units) to be allocated among the agents. Every agent must receive exactly one resource. We study algorithmic approaches towards ensuring fairness in such settings. Minimizing the number of envious agents is known to be NP-complete (Kamiyama et al. 2021). We present two tractable approaches to deal with the computational hardness. When the agents are presented with an initial allocation of houses, we aim to refine this allocation by reallocating a bounded number of houses to reduce the number of envious agents. We show an efficient algorithm when the agents express preference for a bounded number of houses. Next, we consider single peaked preference domain and present a polynomial time algorithm for finding an allocation that minimize the number of envious agents. We further extend it to satisfy Pareto efficiency. Our former algorithm works for other measures of envy such as total envy, or maximum envy, with suitable modifications. Finally, we present an empirical analysis recording the fairness-welfare trade-off of our algorithms.

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