Asymptotic Existence of Class Envy-free Matchings
Journal:
arXiv
Published Date:
Feb 20, 2025
Abstract
We consider a one-sided matching problem where agents who are partitioned
into disjoint classes and each class must receive fair treatment in a desired
matching. This model, proposed by Benabbou et al. [2019], aims to address
various real-life scenarios, such as the allocation of public housing and
medical resources across different ethnic, age, and other demographic groups.
Our focus is on achieving class envy-free matchings, where each class receives
a total utility at least as large as the maximum value of a matching they would
achieve from the items matched to another class. While class envy-freeness for
worst-case utilities is unattainable without leaving some valuable items
unmatched, such extreme cases may rarely occur in practice. To analyze the
existence of a class envy-free matching in practice, we study a distributional
model where agents' utilities for items are drawn from a probability
distribution. Our main result establishes the asymptotic existence of a desired
matching, showing that a round-robin algorithm produces a class envy-free
matching as the number of agents approaches infinity.