English

Breaking the $3/4$ Barrier for Approximate Maximin Share

Computer Science and Game Theory 2023-07-25 v2

Abstract

We study the fundamental problem of fairly allocating a set of indivisible goods among nn agents with additive valuations using the desirable fairness notion of maximin share (MMS). MMS is the most popular share-based notion, in which an agent finds an allocation fair to her if she receives goods worth at least her MMS value. An allocation is called MMS if all agents receive at least their MMS value. Since MMS allocations need not exist when n>2n>2, a series of works showed the existence of approximate MMS allocations with the current best factor of 34+O(1n)\frac34 + O(\frac{1}{n}). However, a simple example in [DFL82, BEF21, AGST23] showed the limitations of existing approaches and proved that they cannot improve this factor to 3/4+Ω(1)3/4 + \Omega(1). In this paper, we bypass these barriers to show the existence of (34+33836)(\frac{3}{4} + \frac{3}{3836})-MMS allocations by developing new reduction rules and analysis techniques.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2307.07304,
  title  = {Breaking the $3/4$ Barrier for Approximate Maximin Share},
  author = {Hannaneh Akrami and Jugal Garg},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2307.07304},
  year   = {2023}
}
R2 v1 2026-06-28T11:30:25.533Z