Authors
Hoon Oh, Ariel D Procaccia, Warut Suksompong
Publication date
2021
Journal
SIAM Journal on Discrete Mathematics
Volume
35
Issue
2
Pages
788-813
Publisher
Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics
Description
We investigate the query complexity of the fair allocation of indivisible goods. For two agents with arbitrary monotonic utilities, we design an algorithm that computes an allocation satisfying envy-freeness up to one good (EF1), a relaxation of envy-freeness, using a logarithmic number of queries. We show that the logarithmic query complexity bound also holds for three agents with additive utilities and that a polylogarithmic bound holds for three agents with monotonic utilities. These results suggest that it is possible to fairly allocate goods in practice even when the number of goods is extremely large. By contrast, we prove that computing an allocation satisfying envy-freeness and another of its relaxations, envy-freeness up to any good (EFX), requires a linear number of queries even when there are only two agents with identical additive utilities.
Total citations
2020202120222023202467947
Scholar articles
H Oh, AD Procaccia, W Suksompong - SIAM Journal on Discrete Mathematics, 2021