Fair Resource Allocation in a Volatile Marketplace

Abstract

In settings where a platform must allocate finite supplies of goods to buyers, balancing overall platform revenues with the fairness of the individual allocations to platform participants is paramount to the well-functioning of the platform. This is made even more difficult by the fact that the supply of goods is in practice stochastic and difficult to forecast, such as in the case of online ad allocation, where the platform manages a supply of impressions that varies over time. In this paper, we design a fair allocation scheme that works in the presence of supply uncertainty. Algorithmically, the scheme repeatedly solves for Fisher market equilibria in a model predictive control fashion and is proved to admit constant factor guarantees versus the offline optimal. In addition, the scheme is tested on a sequence of real ad datasets, showing strong empirical performance.