# Fair Public Decision Making

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/1611.04034 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/1611.04034/

## Key facts

- Cited by 21 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- First posted on arXiv 12 Nov 2016.

## Built on by (most cited first, 21 of 21)

- [Proportional Aggregation of Preferences for Sequential Decision Making](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.14858/) (2023)
- [Temporal Fairness in Multiwinner Voting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.04417/) (2023)
- [Temporal Elections: Welfare, Strategyproofness, and Proportionality](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.13637/) (2024)
- [Temporal Fair Division of Indivisible Items](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.14593/) (2024)
- [Strengthening Proportionality in Temporal Voting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.22513/) (2025)
- [Online Fair Division with Additional Information](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.24503/) (2025)
- [Not in My Backyard! Temporal Voting Over Public Chores](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.08810/) (2025)
- [Approximate Proportionality in Online Fair Division](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.03253/) (2025)
- [The Leximin Approach for a Sequence of Collective Decisions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.18024/) (2023)
- [Fair Division with Market Values](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.23137/) (2024)
- [Fair Shares: Feasibility, Domination and Incentives](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.07519/) (2022)
- [Position: Safety and Fairness in Agentic AI Depend on Interaction Topology, Not on Model Scale or Alignment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.01147/) (2026)
- [PROPm Allocations of Indivisible Goods to Multiple Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.11348/) (2021)
- [Fair Allocation in Dynamic Mechanism Design](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.00147/) (2024)
- [Harm Ratio: A Novel and Versatile Fairness Criterion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.02977/) (2024)
- [Generating Fair Consensus Statements with Social Choice on Token-Level MDPs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.14106/) (2025)
- [Learning Fair and Preferable Allocations through Neural Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.17500/) (2024)
- [Fairness in the Multi-Secretary Problem](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.23097/) (2025)
- [Procedural Fairness in Multi-Agent Bandits](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.10600/) (2026)
- [A General Theory of Proportionality with Additive Utilities](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.08504/) (2026)
- [Fair Like Us? Auditing LLM Alignment in Resource Allocation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.29692/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

We generalize the classic problem of fairly allocating indivisible goods to the problem of fair public decision making, in which a decision must be made on several social issues simultaneously, and, unlike the classic setting, a decision can provide positive utility to multiple players. We extend the popular fairness notion of proportionality (which is not guaranteeable) to our more general setting, and introduce three novel relaxations --- proportionality up to one issue, round robin share, and pessimistic proportional share --- that are also interesting in the classic goods allocation setting. We show that the Maximum Nash Welfare solution, which is known to satisfy appealing fairness properties in the classic setting, satisfies or approximates all three relaxations in our framework. We also provide polynomial time algorithms and hardness results for finding allocations satisfying these axioms, with or without insisting on Pareto optimality.