The price of fairness for a small number of indivisible items

Abstract: Incorporating fairness criteria in optimization problems comes at a certain cost, which is measured by the so-called price of fairness. Here we consider the allocation of indivisible goods. For envy-freeness as fairness criterion it is known from literature that the price of fairness can increase linearly in terms of the number of agents. For the constructive lower bound a quadratic number of items was used. In practice this might be inadequately large. So we introduce the price of fairness in terms of both the number of agents and items, i.e., key parameters which generally may be considered as common and available knowledge. It turned out that the price of fairness increases sublinear if the number of items is not too much larger than the number of agents. For the special case of coincide of both counts exact asymptotics could be determined. Additionally an efficient integer programming formulation is given.