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Group Fairness and Multi-Criteria Optimization in School Assignment

Authors Santhini K. A., Kamesh Munagala, Meghana Nasre, Govind S. Sankar

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  • Theory of computation → Design and analysis of algorithms
Keywords
  • School Assignment
  • Approximation Algorithms
  • Group Fairness

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Abstract

We consider the problem of assigning students to schools when students have different utilities for schools and schools have limited capacities. The students belong to demographic groups, and fairness over these groups is captured either by concave objectives, or additional constraints on the utility of the groups. We present approximation algorithms for this assignment problem with group fairness via convex program rounding. These algorithms achieve various trade-offs between capacity violation and running time. We also show that our techniques easily extend to the setting where there are arbitrary constraints on the feasible assignment, capturing multi-criteria optimization. We present simulation results that demonstrate that the rounding methods are practical even on large problem instances, with the empirical capacity violation being much better than the theoretical bounds.

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Santhini K. A., Kamesh Munagala, Meghana Nasre, and Govind S. Sankar. Group Fairness and Multi-Criteria Optimization in School Assignment. In 6th Symposium on Foundations of Responsible Computing (FORC 2025). Leibniz International Proceedings in Informatics (LIPIcs), Volume 329, pp. 20:1-20:20, Schloss Dagstuhl – Leibniz-Zentrum für Informatik (2025) https://doi.org/10.4230/LIPIcs.FORC.2025.20

Author Details

Santhini K. A.
  • Indian Institute of Technology, Madras, India
  • GPM Government College Manjeshwar, India
Kamesh Munagala
  • Duke University, Durham, NC, USA
Meghana Nasre
  • Indian Institute of Technology, Madras, India
Govind S. Sankar
  • Duke University, Durham, NC, USA

Funding

  • Munagala, Kamesh: Supported by NSF grants CCF-2113798 and IIS-2402823.
  • S. Sankar, Govind: Supported by NSF grants CCF-2113798 and IIS-2402823.

Supplementary Materials

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