In computer science and operations research, the envy minimization problem is the problem of allocating discrete items among agents with different valuations over the items, such that the amount of envy is as small as possible. Ideally, from a fairness perspective, one would like to find an envy-free item allocation - an allocation in which no agent envies another agent. That is: no agent prefers the bundle allocated to another agent. However, with indivisible items this might be impossible. One approach for coping with this impossibility is to turn the problem to an optimization problem, in which the loss function is a function describing the amount of envy. In general, this optimization problem is NP-hard, since even deciding whether an envy-free allocation exists is equivalent to the partition problem. However, there are optimization algorithms that can yield good results in practice. (en)