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Colloquium:  Fair Division: A Theoretical and a Practical Perspective

16 May 2022, Monday. 3PM. London Time. Online over Zoom.

Title: Fair Division: A theoretical and a practical perspective

Speaker: Maria Kyropoulou, University of Essex

Abstract: In this talk I will present two different perspectives in fair division research. A common underlying concept is that of envy-freeness, a natural and widely adopted notion of fairness.

Using an experimental approach, we aim to understand the real-life performance of cake-cutting procedures with respect to fairness and preference manipulation. We run experiments, where human participants were asked to engage with each other or against automata, in order to investigate possible manipulations of the protocols. Our results indicate that the extent of envy that can arise from strategic behaviour is lower in (theoretically) envy-free procedures than proportional and not envy-free ones.From a theoretical standpoint, we study the fairness notion of interim envy-freeness (iEF) for lotteries over allocations, which serves as a sweet spot between the too stringent notion of ex-post envy-freeness and the very weak notion of ex-ante envy-freeness. We derive computational results as well as relate iEF to other fairness notions and reveal tradeoffs between iEF and efficiency. We finally also study the extension of the interim envy-freeness notion when payments to or from the agents are allowed. 

Based on papers: [1] “Fair Cake-Cutting in Practice”. Joint work with Josué Ortega, Erel Segal-Halevi. Games and Economic Behavior 2022.[2] “On Interim Envy-Free Allocation Lotteries”. Joint work with Ioannis Caragiannis and Panagiotis Kanellopoulos. In proceedings of the 22nd ACM Conference on Economics and Computation (EC’21).

Bio: Maria Kyropoulou joined the University of Essex in 2017 and is now a Senior Lecturer. She is also the Director of the Centre of Computational Finance and Economic Agents and co-lead of the Artificial Intelligence research group. Prior to joining Essex, she was a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Oxford, and a stipendiary lecturer for Computer Science at Hertford College, University of Oxford. She received her PhD in Computer Science from the University of Patras in 2014. During her PhD studies, she was a junior researcher at the Computer Technology Institute “Diophantus”, an R&D centre with strong ties to academia. Her research focus is on algorithmic game theory, fair division, and blockchain.

Zoom link https://mdx-ac-uk.zoom.us/j/6684138396?pwd=d0I5V2JlTHVKbjlKWXZ2MW1RZ0ozQT09

Meeting ID: 668 413 8396, Passcode: mdx