Fair and Welfare-Efficient Constrained Multi-Matchings under Uncertainty

Neural Information Processing Systems 

We study fair allocation of constrained resources, where a market designer optimizes overall welfare while maintaining group fairness. In many large-scale settings, utilities are not known in advance, but are instead observed after realizing the allocation. We therefore estimate agent utilities using machine learning. Optimizing over estimates requires trading-off between mean utilities and their predictive variances. We discuss these trade-offs under two paradigms for preference modeling – in the stochastic optimization regime, the market designer has access to a probability distribution over utilities, and in the robust optimization regime they have access to an uncertainty set containing the true utilities with high probability.