  We study fair allocation of indivisible chores (i.e., items with non-positive
value) among agents with additive valuations. An allocation is deemed fair if
it is (approximately) equitable, which means that the disutilities of the
agents are (approximately) equal. Our main theoretical contribution is to show
that there always exists an allocation that is simultaneously equitable up to
one chore (EQ1) and Pareto optimal (PO), and to provide a pseudopolynomial-time
algorithm for computing such an allocation. In addition, we observe that the
Leximin solution---which is known to satisfy a strong form of approximate
equitability in the goods setting---fails to satisfy even EQ1 for chores. It
does, however, satisfy a novel fairness notion that we call equitability up to
any duplicated chore. Our experiments on synthetic as well as real-world data
obtained from the Spliddit website reveal that the algorithms considered in our
work satisfy approximate fairness and efficiency properties significantly more
often than the algorithm currently deployed on Spliddit.
