Chore Division Research Articles

Kajibuntan: A House Chore Division App

Couples often encounter the challenge of sharing house chores. This raises the fundamental question of how to divide chores. In this paper, we present a new application for a fair division of household chores. Our platform, called Kajibuntan, allows couples to specify the set of chores to be shared, their preferences over them, and the current allocation. Our tool visualizes the current allocation and makes proposals according to their preferences based on the theory of fair division. The goal of our tool is to provide a systematic and transparent system to divide household chores and help creating harmony in the home.

Cutting a Cake Fairly for Groups Revisited

Cake cutting is a classic fair division problem, with the cake serving as a metaphor for a heterogeneous divisible resource. Recently, it was shown that for any number of players with arbitrary preferences over a cake, it is possible to partition the players into groups of any desired size and divide the cake among the groups so that each group receives a single contiguous piece and every player is envy-free. For two groups, we characterize the group sizes for which such an assignment can be computed by a finite algorithm, showing that the task is possible exactly when one of the groups is a singleton. We also establish an analogous existence result for chore division, and show that the result does not hold for a mixed cake.

Strategyproof and Proportional Chore Division for Piecewise Uniform Preferences

Strategyproof and Proportional Chore Division for Piecewise Uniform Preferences

Dividing a Graphical Cake

We consider the classical cake-cutting problem where we wish to fairly divide a heterogeneous resource, often modeled as a cake, among interested agents. Work on the subject typically assumes that the cake is represented by an interval. In this paper, we introduce a generalized setting where the cake can be in the form of the set of edges of an undirected graph, allowing us to model the division of road networks. Unlike in the canonical setting, common fairness criteria such as proportionality cannot always be satisfied in our setting if each agent must receive a connected subgraph. We determine the optimal approximation of proportionality that can be obtained for any number of agents with arbitrary valuations, and exhibit a tight guarantee for each graph in the case of two agents. In addition, when more than one connected piece per agent is allowed, we establish the best egalitarian welfare guarantee for each total number of connected pieces. We also study a number of variants and extensions, including when approximate equitability is considered, or when the item to be divided is undesirable (also known as chore division).

Truthful fair division without free disposal

We study the problem of fairly dividing a heterogeneous resource, commonly known as cake cutting and chore division, in the presence of strategic agents. While a number of results in this setting have been established in previous works, they rely crucially on the free disposal assumption, meaning that the mechanism is allowed to throw away part of the resource at no cost. In the present work, we remove this assumption and focus on mechanisms that always allocate the entire resource. We exhibit a truthful and envy-free mechanism for cake cutting and chore division for two agents with piecewise uniform valuations, and we complement our result by showing that such a mechanism does not exist when certain additional constraints are imposed on the mechanisms. Moreover, we provide bounds on the efficiency of mechanisms satisfying various properties, and give truthful mechanisms for multiple agents with restricted classes of valuations.

Chore division on a graph

The paper considers fair allocation of indivisible nondisposable items that generate disutility (chores). We assume that these items are placed in the vertices of a graph and each agent’s share has to form a connected subgraph of this graph. Although a similar model has been investigated before for goods, we show that the goods and chores settings are inherently different. In particular, it is impossible to derive the solution of the chores instance from the solution of its naturally associated fair division instance. We consider three common fair division solution concepts, namely proportionality, envy-freeness and equitability, and two individual disutility aggregation functions: additive and maximum based. We show that deciding the existence of a fair allocation is hard even if the underlying graph is a path or a star. We also present some efficiently solvable special cases for these graph topologies.

Changing gender roles and attitudes and their implications for well-being around the new millennium

PurposeGiven evidence that gender role attitudes (GRAs) and actual gender roles impact on well-being, we examine associations between GRAs, three roles (marital status, household chore division, couple employment) and psychological distress in working-age men and women. We investigate time-trends reflecting broader social and economic changes, by focusing on three age groups at two dates.MethodsWe used British Household Panel Survey data from 20- to 64-year-olds in heterosexual couple households in 1991 (N = 5,302) and 2007 (N = 6,621). We examined: levels of traditional GRAs according to gender, age, date, household and employment roles; associations which GRAs and roles had with psychological distress (measured via the GHQ-12); whether psychological distress increased when GRAs conflicted with actual roles; and whether any of these associations differed according to gender, age or date.ResultsGender traditionalism was lower among women, younger people, those participating in 2007 and in ‘less traditional’ relationships and households. Psychological distress was higher among those with more traditional GRAs and, particularly among men, for those not employed, and there was some evidence of different patterns of association according to age-group. There was limited evidence, among women only, of increased psychological distress when GRAs and actual roles conflicted and/or reductions when GRAs and roles agreed, particularly in respect of household chores and paid employment.ConclusionsAlthough some aspects of gender roles and attitudes (traditionalism and paid employment) are associated with well-being, others (marital status and household chores), and attitude-role consistency, may have little impact on the well-being of contemporary UK adults.Electronic supplementary materialThe online version of this article (doi:10.1007/s00127-013-0730-y) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users.

Men Want Equality, But Women Don't Expect It: Young Adults' Expectations for Participation in Household and Child Care Chores

This study explored whether there was a discrepancy between young adults' ideal and expected participation in household and child care chores as well as what variables predicted expectations for future chore division. Three-hundred fifty-eight unmarried, heterosexual participants with no children completed an online questionnaire assessing the percentage of chores they ideally wished to, and actually expected to, complete in addition to measures of individual differences. Results showed that, although men desired and expected an egalitarian division of labor, women projected that they would actually engage in a disproportionate amount of the household labor and child care. Additionally, women, but not men, expected to do significantly more chores than they ideally wanted. Women with more liberal feminist attitudes ideally wanted to, and expected to, do fewer household and child care chores, whereas men with liberal feminist attitudes ideally wanted to, and expected to, do more. The importance of finding a partner with a career orientation was related to ideally wanting to do more household labor and child care whereas the importance of finding a partner with a family orientation was related to wanting to do less. On the other hand, men and women who felt it was unlikely that they would find family-oriented partners expected to actually do more household chores and child care. Results indicated that young women expected inequity in their relationships, consistent with findings from research on married couples, despite the fact that men expected equality. The importance of structural changes that will set the stage for egalitarianism are discussed.

Marital adjustment in post‐Soviet Eastern Europe: A focus on Lithuania

Abstract Seventy‐five married female and 43 married male residents of Lithuania participated in a questionnaire study of their marital adjustment and marital chore division. The participants reported their marital chore division, beliefs about gender appropriateness for a list of chores, and the number of hours per week they spend on these chores. They also completed the Marital Adjustment Test (H. J. Locke & K. M. Wallace, 1959). Egalitarian chore practices were positively correlated with marital adjustment for women, but egalitarian chore beliefs were positively correlated with marital adjustment for men. The results are consistent with speculation that chore division may be particularly relevant to marital adjustment in a post‐Soviet context that has a tendency toward egalitarianism in the workplace, but not in the home.

Fair Chore Division for Climate Change

Fair Chore Division for Climate Change