Centre for Development Economics
Department of Economics
Delhi School of Economics
ANNOUNCE A SEMINAR
Best of Both Worlds in Fair Division
by
Rohit Vaish
(Indian Institute of Technology, Delhi)
(Indian Institute of Technology, Delhi)
(Thursday, August 13, 2026)
Venue: TBA
Abstract:-
Ensuring fairness is a fundamental aspect of human nature. In times when an increasing amount of decision-making is being handed over to automated systems, it is more important than ever to provide solutions with provable, mathematically rigorous guarantees. The area of fair division provides a formal theoretical framework to reason about such questions in the context of resource allocation.
This talk will focus on the fair allocation of indivisible resources, which arises in real-world settings such as inheritance division and university course allocation. Traditional approaches to this problem involve either randomized allocations that are fair in expectation or deterministic allocations that are approximately fair. I will discuss an algorithmic framework that unifies randomization and approximation. Specifically, I will present an algorithm for finding a randomized allocation of indivisible goods that is ex-ante envy-free and ex-post envy-free up to one good. I will also touch upon some open problems and potential avenues for future research.