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Efficiency and fairness in team search with self-interested agents

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Abstract

We consider team-work settings where individual agents incur costs on behalf of the team. In such settings it is frequently the custom to reimburse agents for the costs they incur (at least in part) in order to promote fairness. We show, however, that when agents are self-interested, such reimbursement can result in degradation in efficiency—at times severe degradation. We thus study the relationship between efficiency and fairness in such settings, distinguishing between ex-ante and ex-post fairness. First, we analyze reimbursement policies that reimburse solely based on purchase receipts (as is customary), and show that with such policies the degradation in both efficiency and fairness can be unbounded. We thus introduce two other families of reimbursement policies. The first family guarantees optimal efficiency and ex-ante fairness, but not ex-post fairness. The second family improves (at times) on ex-post fairness, but at the expense of efficiency, thus providing a tradeoff between the two.

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Notes

  1. We use the terms policy and mechanism interchangeably.

  2. To illustrate, consider the case where \(\alpha \rightarrow 1\). Here, the expected expense is fully attributed to the search cost, hence search should be constrained to the minimum possible (one store).

  3. In this case \(\hat{b}=\frac{c\cdot \beta }{F(r_{\emptyset })}=\frac{c\cdot (k-1)}{k\cdot F(r_{\emptyset })}\) which is equal to the bonus specified in Proposition 5 and the substitution of \(\beta =\frac{k-1}{k}\) and \(\hat{b}=\frac{c\cdot (k-1)}{k\cdot F(r_{\emptyset })}\) results in \(\hat{s}=0\).

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Acknowledgments

Preliminary version of this research appears in the proceedings of the 13th International Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems (AAMAS-14) [39]. The first coauthor was a student at Bar-Ilan University when the research reported in this paper was carried out. This research was partially supported by the ISRAEL SCIENCE FOUNDATION (Grant No. 1083/13) and the ISF-NSFC joint research program (Grant No. 2240/15).

Conflict of interest

The authors declare that they have no conflict of interest.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. School of Computer Science, College of Management, 7502501, Rishon LeZion, Israel

    Igor Rochlin

  2. Department of Computer Science, Bar-Ilan University, 5290002, Ramat-Gan, Israel

    Yonatan Aumann, David Sarne & Luba Golosman

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  1. Igor Rochlin
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  2. Yonatan Aumann
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Correspondence to Igor Rochlin.

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Rochlin, I., Aumann, Y., Sarne, D. et al. Efficiency and fairness in team search with self-interested agents. Auton Agent Multi-Agent Syst 30, 526–552 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10458-015-9319-z

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