Exploring Relations among Fairness Notions in Discrete Fair Division

Jugal Garg, Eklavya Sharma

Abstract: Fairly allocating indivisible items among agents is an important and well-studied problem. However, fairness does not have a single universally agreed-upon definition, and so, many different definitions of fairness have been proposed and studied. Some of these definitions are considered more fair than others, although stronger fairness notions are also more difficult to guarantee. In this work, we study 21 different notions of fairness and arrange them in a hierarchy. Formally, we say that a fairness notion $F_1$ implies another notion $F_2$ if every $F_1$-fair allocation is also an $F_2$-fair allocation. We give a near-complete picture of implications among fairness notions: for almost every pair of notions, we either prove that one notion implies the other, or we give a counterexample, i.e., an allocation that is fair by one notion but not by the other. Although some of these results are well-known, many of them are new. We give results for many different settings: allocating goods, allocating chores, and allocating mixed manna. We believe our work clarifies the relative merits of different fairness notions, and provides a foundation for further research in fair allocation. Moreover, we developed an inference engine to automate part of our work. This inference engine is implemented as a user-friendly web application and is not restricted to fair division scenarios, so it holds potential for broader use.