Fair imposition

We introduce a new mechanism-design problem called fair imposition. In this setting a center wishes to fairly allocate tasks among a set of agents whose cost structures are known only to them, and thus will not reveal their true costs without appropriate incentives. The center, with the power to impose arbitrary tasks and payments on the agents, has the additional goal that his net payment to these agents is never positive (or, that it is tightly bounded if a loss is unavoidable). We consider two different notions of fairness that the center may wish to achieve. The central notion, which we call k-fairness, is in the spirit of max-min fairness. We present both positive results (in the form of concrete mechanisms) and negative results (in the form of impossibility theorems) concerning these criteria. We also briefly discuss an alternative, more traditional interpretation of our setting and results, in the context of auctions.