# Credit Fairness: Online Fairness In Shared Resource Pools

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.17944 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.17944/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 8 of its 23 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 25 Jan 2026.

## Builds on (most cited first, 8 of 8)

- [Repeated Fair Allocation of Indivisible Items](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.01644/) (2023)
- [Fairness-Efficiency Tradeoffs in Dynamic Fair Division](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.11672/) (2019)
- [Temporal Fair Division](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.23416/) (2024)
- [Monotone and Online Fair Division](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.15891/) (2020)
- [Strategy-proofness, Envy-freeness and Pareto efficiency in Online Fair Division with Additive Utilities](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.15900/) (2020)
- [Incentives in Dominant Resource Fair Allocation under Dynamic Demands](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.12401/) (2021)
- [Egalitarian Resource Sharing Over Multiple Rounds](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.02688/) (2021)
- [Beyond Worst-Case Online Allocation via Dynamic Max-min Fairness](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.08881/) (2023)

## Abstract (arXiv)

We study repeated allocation of shared resources among agents with time-varying demands and capped linear utilities. In this setting, independently maximizing the minimum endowment-normalized utility in each round satisfies sharing incentives (agents weakly prefer participating in the mechanism to not participating), strategyproofness (agents have no incentive to misreport their demands), and Pareto efficiency. However, this max-min mechanism can lead to large disparities in the total resources received by agents, even when they have the same average demand. We introduce credit fairness, a property that, together with Pareto efficiency, strengthens sharing incentives by giving agents who lend resources in early rounds priority toward recouping those resources in later rounds. Credit fairness can be achieved in conjunction with either Pareto efficiency or strategyproofness individually, but we show that, under anonymity, it cannot be achieved together with both. We propose a mechanism that is credit fair and Pareto efficient, and evaluate it in a computational resource-sharing setting.