Online Fair Allocation of Perishable Resources

Abstract

We consider a practically motivated variant of the canonical online fair allocation problem: a decision-maker has a budget of resources to allocate over a fixed number of rounds. Each round sees a random number of arrivals, and the decision-maker must commit to an allocation for these individuals before moving on to the next round. In contrast to prior work, we consider a setting in which resources are perishable and individuals' utilities are potentially non-linear (e.g., goods exhibit complementarities). The goal is to construct a sequence of allocations that is envy-free and efficient. We design an algorithm that takes as input (i) a prediction of the perishing order, and (ii) a desired bound on envy. Given the remaining budget in each period, the algorithm uses forecasts of future demand and perishing to adaptively choose one of two carefully constructed guardrail quantities. We characterize conditions under which our algorithm achieves the optimal envy-efficiency Pareto frontier. We moreover demonstrate its strong numerical performance using data from a partnering food bank.