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Benjamin Cookson

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4 papers

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AAAI Conference 2026 Conference Paper

Fairness Perceptions of Large Language Models

Benjamin Cookson
Soroush Ebadian
Nisarg Shah

Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly used for decision-making tasks where fairness is an essential desideratum. But what does fairness even mean to an LLM? To investigate this, we conduct a comprehensive evaluation of how LLMs perceive fairness in the context of resource allocation, using both synthetic and real-world data. We find that several state-of-the-art LLMs, when instructed to be fair, tend to prioritize improving collective welfare rather than distributing benefits equally. Their perception of fairness is somewhat sensitive to how user preferences are represented, but less so to the real-world context of the decision-making task. Finally, we show that the best strategy for aligning an LLM's perception of fairness to a specific criterion is to provide it as a mathematical objective, without referencing "fairness", as this prevents the LLM from mixing the criterion with its own prior notions of fairness. Our results provide practical insights for understanding and shaping how LLMs interpret fairness in resource allocation problems.

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AAAI Conference 2025 Conference Paper

Constrained Fair and Efficient Allocations

Benjamin Cookson
Soroush Ebadian
Nisarg Shah

Fairness and efficiency have become the pillars of modern fair division research, but prior work on achieving both simultaneously is largely limited to the unconstrained setting. We study fair and efficient allocations of indivisible goods under additive valuations and various types of allocation feasibility constraints, and demonstrate the unreasonable effectiveness of the maximum Nash welfare (MNW) solution in this previously uncharted territory. Our main result is that MNW allocations are 1/2-envy-free up to one good (EF1) and Pareto optimal under the broad family of (arbitrary) matroid constraints. We extend these guarantees to complete MNW allocations for base-orderable matroid constraints, and to a family of non-matroid constraints (which includes balancedness). We establish tightness of our results by providing counterexamples for the satisfiability of certain stronger desiderata, but show an improved result for the special case of goods with copies (Gafni et al. 2023). Finally, we also establish novel best-of-both-worlds guarantees for goods with copies and balancedness.

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AAAI Conference 2025 Conference Paper

Temporal Fair Division

Benjamin Cookson
Soroush Ebadian
Nisarg Shah

We study temporal fair division, whereby a set of agents are allocated a (possibly different) set of goods on each day for a period of days. We study this setting, as well as a number of its special cases formed by the restrictions to two agents, same goods on each day, identical preferences, or combinations thereof, and chart out the landscape of achieving two types of fairness guarantees simultaneously: fairness on each day (per day) and fairness over time (up to each day, or the weaker version, overall). In the most general setting, we prove that there always exists an allocation that is stochastically-dominant envy-free up to one good (SD-EF1) per day and proportional up to one good (PROP1) overall, and when all the agents have identical preferences, we show that SD-EF1 per day and SD-EF1 overall can be guaranteed. For the case of two agents, we prove that SD-EF1 per day and EF1 up to each day can be guaranteed using an envy balancing technique. We provide counterexamples for other combinations that establish our results as among the best guarantees possible, but also leave open some tantalizing questions.

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NeurIPS Conference 2025 Conference Paper

Unifying Proportional Fairness in Centroid and Non-Centroid Clustering

Benjamin Cookson
Nisarg Shah
Ziqi Yu

Proportional fairness criteria inspired by democratic ideals of proportional representation have received growing attention in the clustering literature. Prior work has investigated them in two separate paradigms. Chen et al. [ICML 2019] study centroid clustering, in which each data point's loss is determined by its distance to a representative point (centroid) chosen in its cluster. Caragiannis et al. [NeurIPS 2024] study non-centroid clustering, in which each data point's loss is determined by its maximum distance to any other data point in its cluster. We generalize both paradigms to introduce semi-centroid clustering, in which each data point's loss is a combination of its centroid and non-centroid losses, and study two proportional fairness criteria---the core and, its relaxation, fully justified representation (FJR). Our main result is a novel algorithm which achieves a constant approximation to the core, in polynomial time, even when the distance metrics used for centroid and non-centroid loss measurements are different. We also derive improved results for more restricted loss functions and the weaker FJR criterion, and establish lower bounds in each case.

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