We consider the problem of fairly allocating indivisible goods, focusing on a recently-introduced notion of fairness called maximin share guarantee: Each player’s value for his allocation should be at least as high as what he can guarantee by dividing the items into as many bundles as there are players and receiving his least desirable bundle. Assuming additive valuation functions, we show that...

K-means is undoubtedly the most widely used partitional clustering algorithm. Unfortunately, this algorithm is highly sensitive to the initial selection of the cluster centers. Numerous initialization methods have been proposed to address this drawback. Many of these methods, however, have superlinear complexity in the number of data points, which makes them impractical for large data sets. On ...

We consider fair allocation of indivisible items under an additional constraint: there is an undirected graph describing the relationship between the items, and each agent’s share must form a connected subgraph of this graph. This framework captures, e.g., fair allocation of land plots, where the graph describes the accessibility relation among the plots. We focus on agents that have additive u...

In this paper, we seek robust policies for uncertain Markov Decision Processes (MDPs). Most robust optimization approaches for these problems have focussed on the computation of maximin policies which maximize the value corresponding to the worst realization of the uncertainty. Recent work has proposed minimax regret as a suitable alternative to the maximin objective for robust optimization. Ho...

In this paper D-optimal designs for free knot least squares spline estimation are investigated. In contrast to most of the literature on optimal design for spline regression models it is assumed that the knots of the spline are also estimated from the data, which yields to optimal design problems for nonlinear models. In some cases local D-optimal designs can be found explicitly. Moreover, it i...

A premature death unexpectedly brings a life and a career to their end, leading to substantial welfare losses. We study the retirement decision in an economy with risky lifetime, and compare the laissezfaire with egalitarian social optima. We consider two social objectives: (1) the maximin on expected lifetime welfare (ex ante), allowing for a compensation for unequal life expectancies; (2) the...

The Precautionary Principle is introduced and shown to be applicable to several kinds of biotechnology, such as the agricultural production of biofuels and the release of genetically modified varieties of food-species and of medicinal species into the environment. This Principle has been accused of involving policies of Maximin. However, the crucial difference between these stances is clarified...

Considering sustainability a matter of intergenerational welfare equity, this paper examines whether an optimal development path can also be sustainable. It argues that the general “zero-net-aggregateinvestment” condition for an optimal development path to be sustainable in the sense of the maximin criterion of intergenerational justice is too demanding to be practical, especially in the contex...

For the problem of checking linearity in a heteroscedastic nonparametric regression model under a xed design assumption we study maximin designs which maximize the minimum power of a nonparametric test over a broad class of alternatives from the as sumed linear regression model It is demonstrated that the optimal design depends sensi tively on the used estimation technique i e weighted or ordin...

Complexity of voting manipulation is a prominent research topic in computational social choice. The voting manipulation literature usually assumes that the manipulator is only concerned with improving the outcome of the election from her perspective. However, in practice, the manipulator may also be reluctant to lie, i.e., she may have a preference for submitting a vote that does not deviate to...