Truthful fair division without free disposal

Conference item

We study the problem of fairly dividing a heterogeneous resource, commonly known as cake cutting and chore division, in the presence of strategic agents. While a number of results in this setting have been established in previous works, they rely crucially on the free disposal assumption, meaning that the mechanism is allowed to throw away part of the resource at no cost. In the present work, we remove this assumption and focus on mechanisms that always allocate the entire resource. We exhibit a truthful envy-free mechanism for cake cutting and chore division for two agents with piecewise uniform valuations, and we complement our result by showing that such a mechanism does not exist when certain additional assumptions are made. Moreover, we give truthful mechanisms for multiple agents with restricted classes of valuations.

Authors: Bei, X; Huzhang, G; Suksompong, W

• Publication status: Published
• Peer review status: Peer reviewed
• Publisher: International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence Organization
• Host title: IJCAI 2018 Proceedings
• Journal: International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence
• Volume: 2018
• Pages: 63-69
• Publication date: 2018-07-16
• Acceptance date: 2018-04-16
• DOI: 10.24963/ijcai.2018/9
• ISSN: 1045-0823
• ISBN: 9780999241127
• Keywords: agent-based and multi-agent systems: algorithmic game theory; agent-based and multi-agent systems: resource allocation; agent-based and multi-agent systems: computational social choice