Papers for

task management teams

Papers whose findings have a practical use for this group, as judged from the abstract. Open a paper to read what it means in practice.

Online fair chore assignment matches offline guarantees with known cost types

MMS Allocation for Chores with Online Agent Arrivals

Abstract: We study the fair allocation of $m$ indivisible chores to $n$ agents with subadditive cost functions arriving online in an arbitrary order. Upon an agent's arrival, we are informed of her cost function and must irrevocably assign her a set of chores. We focus on the Maximin Share (MMS) fairness notion and aim to compute an allocation in which all items are assigned, and no agent incurs a cost more than $α$ times her MMS. Without any prior information about the instance (other than $n$ and $m$), we design an algorithm with a competitive ratio of $O(\min\{n, k\log^{1+ε}k, \log m\})$ for any constant $ε> 0$, where $k$ denotes the number of cost function types. Our bound matches the best known offline approximation guarantees for MMS under subadditive costs and is nearly optimal with respect to all three parameters: we show that even for binary additive cost functions, no online algorithm can achieve a competitive ratio of $o(\min\{n, k\log k, \log m\})$. We then consider the setting in which the $k$ cost function types are known in advance (though the realized types of arriving agents are not). For additive cost functions, we provide an algorithm with a competitive ratio of $O(\min\{\log k, \log(kn)/\log\log(kn)\})$, and show that constant-competitive algorithms do not exist for general $k$, even for the binary additive setting. For binary additive functions when $k \le n$, we propose a $3$-competitive algorithm and establish a lower bound of $2$.

Thu 10 SeptComputer Science and Game Theory
The gist
This paper looks at how to fairly divide chores among people who arrive one by one, without knowing future arrivals. The authors focus on keeping the chore cost for each person close to what they would get if chores were split perfectly fairly. They provide algorithms that assign chores on the fly while ensuring fairness within reasonable bounds, matching what is possible if you knew everyone in advance. They also prove that their results are close to the best possible for this problem. Additional improvements come when some information about the types of people arriving is known beforehand.
Open 2609.10960v1