Fairness Concepts

Issues of fairness arise in many different situations that involve a certain distribution of resources, an allocation of costs or objects, or any other algorithmic division process. This chapter discusses these issues of fairness. It starts with an introduction to certain general aspects of fairness for the models at stake, dealing especially with the concept of responsibility. In the following sections, the focus lies in particular on some specific fair division settings, such as claims problems, cost sharing, and the division of indivisible items. We introduce various well-known fair division procedures and discuss their normative foundations in terms of widely used axioms in the literature. Several numerical examples are provided.