Exploiting a Common Property Resource Under a Fairness Constraint: A Case Study

Abstract

Resources co-funded by several agents must be exploited in such a way that three kinds of constraints are met: (1) physical problem (hard) constraints; (2) efficiency constraints, aiming at maximizing the satisfaction of each agent; (3) a fairness constraint, which is ideally satisfied when each agent receives an amount of the resource exactly proportional to its financial contribution. This paper investigates a decision problem for which the common property resource is an earth observation satellite. The problem is to decide on the daily selection of a subset of pictures, among a set of candidate pictures which could be taken the next day considering the satellite trajectory. This subset must satisfy the three kinds of constraints stated above. Although fair division problems have received considerable attention for a long time, especially from microeconomists, this specific problem does not fall entirely within a classical approach. This is because the candidate pictures may be incompatible, and because a picture is only of value to the agent requesting it. As in the general case, efficiency and fairness constraints are antagonistic. We propose three ways for solving this share problem. The first one gives priority to fairness, the second one to efficiency, and the third one computes a set of compromises. 1