The Price of Fairness

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.

• Publication year

  2011

• Venue

  Operational Research

• Publication date

  Unknown publication date

• Fields of study

  Computer Science, Economics

• Identifiers
  DOI 10.1287/OPRE.1100.0865
• External record

  Open on Semantic Scholar

• Source metadata

  Semantic Scholar

• No claims are published for this paper.

• No concepts are published for this paper.

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