A well-regarded fairness notion when dividing indivisible chores is envy-freeness up to one item (EF1), which requires that pairwise envy can be eliminated by the removal of a single item. While an EF1 and Pareto optimal (PO) allocation of goods can always be found via well-known algorithms, even the existence of such solutions for chores remains open, to date. We take an epistemic approach utilizing information asymmetry by introducing dubious chores--items that inflict no cost on receiving agents but are perceived costly by others. On a technical level, dubious chores provide a more fine-grained approximation of envy-freeness than EF1. We show that finding allocations with minimal number of dubious chores is computationally hard. Nonetheless, we prove the existence of envy-free and fractional PO allocations for agents with only dubious chores and strengthen it to dubious chores in four special classes of valuations. Our experimental analysis demonstrates that often only a few dubious chores are needed to achieve envy-freeness.
View on arXiv@article{hosseini2025_2305.02986,
title={ Distribution of Chores with Information Asymmetry },
author={ Hadi Hosseini and Joshua Kavner and Tomasz Wąs and Lirong Xia },
journal={arXiv preprint arXiv:2305.02986},
year={ 2025 }
}