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Online Market Equilibrium with Application to Fair Division

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  • Yuan Gao
  • Christian Kroer
  • Alex Peysakhovich

Abstract

Computing market equilibria is a problem of both theoretical and applied interest. Much research to date focuses on the case of static Fisher markets with full information on buyers' utility functions and item supplies. Motivated by real-world markets, we consider an online setting: individuals have linear, additive utility functions; items arrive sequentially and must be allocated and priced irrevocably. We define the notion of an online market equilibrium in such a market as time-indexed allocations and prices which guarantee buyer optimality and market clearance in hindsight. We propose a simple, scalable and interpretable allocation and pricing dynamics termed as PACE. When items are drawn i.i.d. from an unknown distribution (with a possibly continuous support), we show that PACE leads to an online market equilibrium asymptotically. In particular, PACE ensures that buyers' time-averaged utilities converge to the equilibrium utilities w.r.t. a static market with item supplies being the unknown distribution and that buyers' time-averaged expenditures converge to their per-period budget. Hence, many desirable properties of market equilibrium-based fair division such as no envy, Pareto optimality, and the proportional-share guarantee are also attained asymptotically in the online setting. Next, we extend the dynamics to handle quasilinear buyer utilities, which gives the first online algorithm for computing first-price pacing equilibria. Finally, numerical experiments on real and synthetic datasets show that the dynamics converges quickly under various metrics.

Suggested Citation

  • Yuan Gao & Christian Kroer & Alex Peysakhovich, 2021. "Online Market Equilibrium with Application to Fair Division," Papers 2103.12936, arXiv.org, revised Oct 2021.
    • Handle: RePEc:arx:papers:2103.12936
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    References listed on IDEAS

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    Cited by:

    1. Luofeng Liao & Yuan Gao & Christian Kroer, 2022. "Statistical Inference for Fisher Market Equilibrium," Papers 2209.15422, arXiv.org.
    2. Devansh Jalota & Yinyu Ye, 2022. "Stochastic Online Fisher Markets: Static Pricing Limits and Adaptive Enhancements," Papers 2205.00825, arXiv.org, revised Sep 2024.
    3. Luofeng Liao & Christian Kroer, 2023. "Statistical Inference and A/B Testing for First-Price Pacing Equilibria," Papers 2301.02276, arXiv.org, revised Jun 2023.
    4. Luofeng Liao & Christian Kroer & Sergei Leonenkov & Okke Schrijvers & Liang Shi & Nicolas Stier-Moses & Congshan Zhang, 2024. "Interference Among First-Price Pacing Equilibria: A Bias and Variance Analysis," Papers 2402.07322, arXiv.org, revised Jan 2025.

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