Multi Agent Resource Allocation — Serial dictatorship with ties

Resource allocation in agent societies, which in current literature, is also called as Multi-Agent Resource Allocation (MARA) problem, is the problem of deciding how to distribute a number of resources among a number of agents. It is a growing area of research at the interface of economics and computer science. In this paper, we study the problem of designing a mechanism to allocate a fixed number of objects to agents in a strategy-proof and pareto-efficient way, when each agent has a quota of varying number and indifference of ranking among a set of bundles is allowed. Each agent i needs a_i (≥1) many objects from the set of objects R, while having preferences over the set of bundles of size a_i. The motivation for us to study such a problem comes from a problem called the site selection problem, which arises often in the military domain. In this paper, we model this site selection problem as a MARA problem. In our model, though we consider a restricted preference, which is justified by the motivating example that is the site selection problem, our algorithm can also accommodate unrestricted preference, that is preference over all possible bundles of size a_i. Our main result (Theorem A) ensures that the algorithm developed satisfies both pareto-efficiency and strategy-proofness.