Bicriteria Models for Fair and Efficient Resource Allocation

Resource allocation problems are concerned with the allocation of limited resources among competing agents so as to achieve the best system performances. In systems which serve many users, like in networking, there is a need to respect some fairness rules while looking for the overall efficiency. The so-called Max-Min Fairness is widely used to meet these goals. However, allocating the resource to optimize the worst performance may cause a dramatic worsening of the overall system efficiency. Therefore, several other fair allocation schemes are searched and analyzed. In this paper we show how the scalar inequality measures can be consistently used in bicriteria models to search for fair and efficient allocations while taking into account importance weighting of the agents.