Optimal Efficiency-Envy Trade-Off via Optimal Transport
Authors: Steven Yin, Christian Kroer

We consider the problem of allocating a distribution of items to $n$ recipients where each recipient has to be allocated a fixed, pre-specified fraction of all items, while ensuring that each recipient does not experience too much envy.  We show that this problem can be formulated as a variant of the semi-discrete optimal transport (OT) problem, whose solution structure in this case has a concise representation and a simple geometric interpretation.  Unlike existing literature that treats envy-freeness as a hard constraint, our formulation allows us to \emph{optimally} trade off efficiency and envy continuously.  Additionally, we study the statistical properties of the space of our OT based allocation policies by showing a polynomial bound on the number of samples needed to approximate the optimal solution from samples.  Our approach is suitable for large-scale fair allocation problems such as the blood donation matching problem, and we show numerically that it performs well on a prior realistic data simulator.