The Price of Fairness
By Dimitris J. Bertsimas, Vivek F. Farias, Nikolaos Trichakis. 2011
738 citations recorded by the source corpus.
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.
Subfields: Economics and Econometrics, Management Science and Operations Research
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Citations in the corpus
- Lawyers are Dishonest? Quantifying Representational Harms in Commonsense Knowledge Resources (2021, background): “This is the price we paid for achieving fairness which is common in fairness literature (Bertsimas et al., 2011).”
- Non-Discriminatory Machine Learning through Convex Fairness Criteria (2018, background): “It can be shown that such a classifier is Pareto optimal and has many other interesting game theoretic properties (which are outside the scope of this paper : see (Bertsimas, Farias, and Trichakis 2011)).”
- On the Efficiency-Fairness Trade-off (2012, neutral): “The efficiency loss relative to the maximum system efficiency is the so-called price of fairness (Bertsimas et al. 2011), defined in this case as POFï¿¿U ï¿¿ ï¿¿ï¿¿ = SYSTEMï¿¿U ï¿¿ − FAIRï¿¿U ï¿¿ ï¿¿ï¿¿ SYSTEMï¿¿U ï¿¿ ï¿¿ This price is a number between zero and one, and corresponds to the…”