Decreasing Demand procedure
The Decreasing Demand Procedure is a procedure for fair item assignment. It yields a Pareto-efficient division that maximizes the rank of the agent with the lowest rank. This corresponds to the Rawlsian justice criterion of taking care of the worst-off agent.
The procedure was developed by Dorothea Herreiner and Clemens Puppe.[1]
Description
Each agent is supposed to have a linear ranking on all bundles of items.
The agents are queried in a round-robin fashion: each agent, in turn, reports his next bundle in the ranking, going from the best to the worst.
After each report, the procedure checks whether it is possible to construct a complete partition of the items based on the reports made so far. If it is possible, then the procedure stops and returns one such partition. If there is more than one partition, then a Pareto-efficient one is returned.
The procedure produces "balanced" allocations, that is, allocations which maximize the rank in the preference ordering of the bundle obtained by the worst-off agent.[2]: 308
References
- ^ Herreiner, Dorothea; Puppe, Clemens (2014). "A simple procedure for finding equitable allocations of indivisible goods". Social Choice and Welfare. 19 (2): 415. doi:10.1007/s003550100119.
- ^ Brandt, Felix; Conitzer, Vincent; Endriss, Ulle; Lang, Jérôme; Procaccia, Ariel D. (2016). Handbook of Computational Social Choice. Cambridge University Press. ISBN 9781107060432. (free online version)