Fair division is an age-old problem that deals with the allocation of items among agents with diverse preferences in a fair and efficient way. It naturally arises in various real-life situations, from interpersonal to international conflicts. In the discrete setting, envy-freeness up to any item (EFX) has emerged as a compelling fairness criterion, though its existence remains one of the most important open problems in fair division. In this talk, I will present recent advances in the fair allocation of indivisible chores, focusing on the first constant-factor approximation of EFX, achieved through the novel concept of earning-restricted competitive equilibrium.
Short Bio:
Jugal Garg is an associate professor of Industrial and Enterprise Systems Engineering and an affiliate associate professor of Siebel School of Computing and Data Science at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Jugal's research studies algorithms and complexity for some of the most fundamental problems in economics and computation, with a particular focus on allocation problems arising in fair division and general equilibrium theory. He has received several awards for his research, including the NSF CAREER Award, the Exemplary Theory Paper Award at ACM EC 2020, the INFORMS Koopman Prize 2021, and the Dean's Award for Excellence in Research 2022.
