Existence of Fair and Efficient Allocation of Indivisible Chores

Abstract

We study the problem of allocating indivisible chores among agents with additive cost functions in a fair and efficient manner. A major open question in this area is whether there always exists an allocation that is envy-free up to one chore (EF1) and Pareto optimal (PO). Our main contribution is to provide a positive answer to this question by proving the existence of such an allocation for indivisible chores under additive cost functions. This is achieved by a novel combination of a fixed point argument and a discrete algorithm, providing a significant methodological advance in this area. Our additional key contributions are as follows. We show that there always exists an allocation that is EF1 and fractional Pareto optimal (fPO), where fPO is a stronger efficiency concept than PO. We also show that an EF1 and PO allocation can be computed in polynomial time when the number of agents is constant. Finally, we extend all of these results to the more general setting of weighted EF1 (wEF1), which accounts for the entitlements of agents.