A General Framework for Fair Allocation under Matroid Rank Valuations

Abstract: We study the problem of fairly allocating a set of indivisible goods among agents with matroid rank valuations -- every good provides a marginal value of $0$ or $1$ when added to a bundle and valuations are submodular. We generalize the Yankee Swap algorithm to create a simple framework, called General Yankee Swap, that can efficiently compute allocations that maximize any justice criterion (or fairness objective) satisfying some mild assumptions. Along with maximizing a justice criterion, General Yankee Swap is guaranteed to maximize utilitarian social welfare, ensure strategyproofness and use at most a quadratic number of valuation queries. We show how General Yankee Swap can be used to compute allocations for five different well-studied justice criteria: (a) Prioritized Lorenz dominance, (b) Maximin fairness, (c) Weighted leximin, (d) Max weighted Nash welfare, and (e) Max weighted $p$-mean welfare. In particular, our framework provides the first polynomial time algorithms to compute weighted leximin, max weighted Nash welfare and max weighted $p$-mean welfare allocations for agents with matroid rank valuations.