Fair Division Under Inaccurate Preferences

2026-02-27

AI Summary

This study addresses the problem of fair allocation of indivisible goods under additive noise—either stochastic or adversarial—in agents’ preferences, with the objective of minimizing envy. It presents the first systematic analysis of both offline and online fair division under noisy preferences, extending classical results in randomized fair allocation and algorithmic discrepancy theory to noisy settings. Through probabilistic and worst-case analyses, combined with the Round-Robin algorithm and online learning techniques, the work establishes that envy-free allocations are achievable with high probability under stochastic noise. In the adversarial setting with bounded noise, it proves a tight upper bound on the envy incurred by the Round-Robin algorithm. Furthermore, an efficient online algorithm is designed that achieves logarithmic maximum envy when items arrive sequentially.

Technology Category

• Game Theory and Economic Paradigms: Fair Division
• Machine Learning: Online Learning & Bandits
• Reasoning under Uncertainty: Stochastic Optimization

Application Category

• Economics, Online Markets and Human Computation: Fairness, privacy, and diversity in economic environments
• Graph Algorithms and Modeling for the Web: Algorithms and analysis for incomplete, noisy, or partially observed Web-related graphs
• Responsible Web: Human-perceived consequences of algorithmic deployment on the web

Abstract

The fair allocation of scarce resources is a central problem in mathematics, computer science, operations research, and economics. While much of the fair-division literature assumes that individuals have underlying cardinal preferences, eliciting exact numerical values is often cognitively burdensome and prone to inaccuracies. A growing body of work in fair division addresses this challenge by assuming access only to ordinal preferences. However, the restricted expressiveness of ordinal preferences makes it challenging to quantify and optimize cardinal fairness objectives such as envy. In this paper, we explore the broad landscape of fair division of indivisible items given inaccurate cardinal preferences, with a focus on minimizing envy. We consider various settings based on whether the true preferences of the agents are stochastic or worst-case, and whether the inaccuracies, modeled as additive noise, are stochastic or worst-case. When the true preferences are stochastic, we show that envy-free allocations can be computed with high probability; this is achieved both in the setting with stochastic and worst-case noise. This generalizes a notable result in stochastic fair division, which establishes a similar guarantee, albeit in the absence of any noise. When the true preferences are worst-case, and the noise is bounded, we analyze the maximum envy achieved by the Round-Robin algorithm. This bound is shown to be tight for deterministic algorithms, and applications of this bound are provided. Lastly, we consider a setting with worst-case preferences and noise, where the true preferences for each item are revealed upon its allocation. Here, we give an efficient online algorithm that guarantees logarithmic maximum envy with high probability. This result generalizes a known result from algorithmic discrepancy to a setting with noisy input data.

Problem

• fair division
• inaccurate preferences
• envy minimization
• indivisible items
• noisy preferences

Innovation

• fair division
• inaccurate preferences
• envy minimization
• Round-Robin algorithm
• online allocation