Abstract: What is a fair way to assign rooms to several housemates, and divide the rent between them? This is not just a theoretical question: many people have used the Spliddit website to obtain envy-free solutions to rent division instances. But envy freeness, in and of itself, is insufficient to guarantee outcomes that people view as intuitive and acceptable. We therefore focus on solutions that optimize a criterion of social justice, subject to the envy freeness constraint, in order to pinpoint the “fairest” solutions. We develop a general algorithmic framework that enables the computation of such solutions in polynomial time. We then study the relations between natural optimization objectives, and identify the maximin solution, which maximizes the minimum utility subject to envy freeness, as the most attractive. We demonstrate, in theory and using experiments on real data from Spliddit, that the maximin solution gives rise to significant gains in terms of our optimization objectives. Finally, a user study with Spliddit users as subjects demonstrates that people find the maximin solution to be significantly fairer than arbitrary envy-free solutions; this user study is unprecedented in that it asks people about their real-world rent division instances. Based on these results, the maximin solution has been deployed on Spliddit since April 2015.

Citation: Ya’akov Gal, Moshe Mash, Ariel D. Procaccia, Yair Zick. Which Is the Fairest (Rent Division) of Them All? ACM Conference on Economics and Computation (EC), July, Maasticht, The Netherlands. Best Paper Award.

Download: http://bit.ly/2iQYwGz

Abstract: On the Web, where resources such as documents and data are published, shared, transformed, and republished, provenance is a crucial piece of metadata that would allow users to place their trust in the resources they access. The Open Provenance Model (OPM) is a community data model for provenance that is designed to facilitate the meaningful interchange of provenance information between systems. Underpinning OPM is a notion of directed graph, where nodes represent data products and processes involved in past computations, and edges represent dependencies between them; it is complemented by graphical inference rules allowing new dependencies to be derived. Until now, however, the OPM model was a purely syntactical endeavor. The present paper extends OPM graphs with an explicit distinction between precise and imprecise edges. Then a formal semantics for the thus enriched OPM graphs is proposed, by viewing OPM graphs as temporal theories on the temporal events represented in the graph. The original OPM inference rules are scrutinized in view of the semantics and found to be sound but incomplete. An extended set of graphical rules is provided and proved to be complete for inference. The paper concludes with applications of the formal semantics to inferencing in OPM graphs, operators on OPM graphs, and a formal notion of refinement among OPM graphs.

doi: http://eprints.soton.ac.uk/id/eprint/374183

Citation: Natalia Kwasnikowska, Luc Moreau, and Jan Van den Bussche. A formal account of the open provenance model. ACM Transactions on the Web, February 2015.

Download: http://bit.ly/2j900wX