← Search

The Price of Fairness

Dimitris Bertsimas; Vivek F. Farias; Nikolaos Trichakis

Operations Research Center, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, Massachusetts 02139;

Operations Research 2011

In this paper we study resource allocation problems that involve multiple self-interested parties or players and a central decision maker. We introduce and study the price of fairness, which is the relative system efficiency loss under a “fair” allocation assuming that a fully efficient allocation is one that maximizes the sum of player utilities. We focus on two well-accepted, axiomatically justified notions of fairness, viz., proportional fairness and max-min fairness. For these notions we provide a tight characterization of the price of fairness for a broad family of problems.

DOI
10.1287/opre.1100.0865
Volume
59 (1)
Pages
17-31
Language
en
Export
BibTeX
Sources
crossref openalex