Envy-free house allocation with minimum subsidy

Abstract

House allocation refers to the problem where m houses are to be allocated to n agents so that each agent receives one house. Since an envy-free house allocation does not always exist, we consider finding such an allocation in the presence of subsidy. We show that computing an envy-free allocation with minimum subsidy is NP-hard in general, but can be done efficiently if m differs from n by an additive constant or if the agents have identical utilities.