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Fair Enough: Guaranteeing Approximate Maximin Shares

Published: 06 February 2018 Publication History

Abstract

We consider the problem of fairly allocating indivisible goods, focusing on a recently introduced notion of fairness called maximin share guarantee: each player’s value for his allocation should be at least as high as what he can guarantee by dividing the items into as many bundles as there are players and receiving his least desirable bundle. Assuming additive valuation functions, we show that such allocations may not exist, but allocations guaranteeing each player 2/3 of the above value always exist. These theoretical results have direct practical implications.

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Published In

cover image Journal of the ACM
Journal of the ACM  Volume 65, Issue 2
April 2018
244 pages
ISSN:0004-5411
EISSN:1557-735X
DOI:10.1145/3184466
Issue’s Table of Contents
Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than the author(s) must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected].

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Association for Computing Machinery

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Publication History

Published: 06 February 2018
Accepted: 01 September 2017
Revised: 01 December 2016
Received: 01 June 2015
Published in JACM Volume 65, Issue 2

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  1. Computational fair division

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