AAMAS Tutorial on Fair Division


Resource allocation has always been a central topic of concern in the multiagent systems research community. Mechanisms for dividing a set of goods amongst several agents need to balance (economic) efficiency and fairness requirements. For instance, for an allocation to be efficient we may want it to maximise the sum of individual agent utilities, while a common interpretations of fairness is envy-freeness: no agent should prefer someone else's bundle of goods to their own lot. While efficiency issues are routinely being addressed in multiagent systems research, fairness is only just starting to receive broad attention.

This tutorial, to be held at the 7th International Joint Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems (AAMAS-2008), will be an introduction to fair division for multiagent systems researchers.

The tutorial will cover three main topics: