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Fairly Allocating Contiguous Blocks of Indivisible Items

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Algorithmic Game Theory (SAGT 2017)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNISA,volume 10504))

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Abstract

In this paper, we study the classic problem of fairly allocating indivisible items with the extra feature that the items lie on a line. Our goal is to find a fair allocation that is contiguous, meaning that the bundle of each agent forms a contiguous block on the line. While allocations satisfying the classical fairness notions of proportionality, envy-freeness, and equitability are not guaranteed to exist even without the contiguity requirement, we show the existence of contiguous allocations satisfying approximate versions of these notions that do not degrade as the number of agents or items increases. We also study the efficiency loss of contiguous allocations due to fairness constraints.

The full version of this paper is available at http://arxiv.org/abs/1707.00345.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    The algorithm is inspired by work on block partitions of sequences [4].

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Computer Science, Stanford University, 353 Serra Mall, Stanford, CA, 94305, USA

    Warut Suksompong

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  1. Warut Suksompong
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Correspondence to Warut Suksompong .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. University of Salento, Lecce, Italy

    Vittorio Bilò

  2. University of L'Aquila, L'Aquila, Italy

    Michele Flammini

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Suksompong, W. (2017). Fairly Allocating Contiguous Blocks of Indivisible Items. In: Bilò, V., Flammini, M. (eds) Algorithmic Game Theory. SAGT 2017. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 10504. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-66700-3_26

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-66700-3_26

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  • Publisher Name: Springer, Cham

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-319-66699-0

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-319-66700-3

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