Differentially private fair division

Abstract

Fairness and privacy are two important concerns in social decision-making processes such as resource allocation. We initiate the study of privacy in fair division by investigating the fair allocation of indivisible resources using the well-established framework of differential privacy. We present algorithms for approximate envy-freeness and proportionality when two instances are considered to be adjacent if they differ only on the utility of a single agent for a single item. On the other hand, we provide strong negative results for both fairness criteria when the adjacency notion allows the entire utility function of a single agent to change.