Finding Fair and Efficient Allocations When Valuations Don't Add Up

In this paper, we present new results on the fair and efficient allocation of indivisible goods to agents that have monotone, submodular, non-additive valuation functions over bundles. Despite their simple structure, these agent valuations are a natural model for several real-world domains. We show that, if such a valuation function has binary marginal gains, a socially optimal (i.e. utilitarian social welfare-maximizing) allocation that achieves envy-freeness up to one item (EF1) exists and is computationally tractable. We also prove that the Nash welfare-maximizing and the leximin allocations both exhibit this fairness-efficiency combination, by showing that they can be achieved by minimizing any symmetric strictly convex function over utilitarian optimal outcomes. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first valuation function class not subsumed by additive valuations for which it has been established that an allocation maximizing Nash welfare is EF1. Moreover, for a subclass of these valuation functions based on maximum (unweighted) bipartite matching, we show that a leximin allocation can be computed in polynomial time.