Allocating Goods on a Graph to Eliminate Envy

We introduce a distributed negotiation framework for multiagent resource allocation where interactions between agents are limited by a graph defining a negotiation topology. A group of agents may only contract a deal if that group is fully connected according to the negotiation topology. An important criterion for assessing the quality of an allocation of resources, in terms of fairness, is envy-freeness: an agent is said to envy another agent if it would prefer to swap places with that other agent. We analyse under what circumstances a sequence of deals respecting the negotiation topology may be expected to converge to a state where no agent envies any of the agents it is directly connected to. We also analyse the computational complexity of a related decision problem, namely the problem of checking whether a given negotiation state admits any deal that would both be beneficial to every agent involved and reduce envy in the agent society.

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2007
• Where: AAAI
• Authors: Yann Chevaleyre, Ulrich Endriss, Nicolas Maudet
• Keywords: AAAI 2007, Distributed Negotiation Framework, Intelligent Agents, Multiagent Resource Allocation, Negotiation Topology