Theory and Practice of Fair Food Allocation

Abstract: Food rescue organizations worldwide are leading programs aimed at addressing food waste and food insecurity. Food Drop is such a program, run by the non-governmental organization Indy Hunger Network (IHN), in the state of Indiana, in the United States. Food Drop matches truck drivers with rejected truckloads of food --- food that would otherwise be discarded at a landfill --- to food banks. Matching decisions are currently made by the Food Assistance Programs Manager of IHN. In this talk, I will discuss a partnership with IHN with the goal of completely automating Food Drop. Motivated by this collaboration, I will present a series of theoretical models and results for the fair division of indivisible goods, with each model refining our understanding of the essence of IHN's problem. These results directly informed our choice of algorithm for matching drivers to food banks for the platform we built for IHN.