English

Truthful Fair Division

Computer Science and Game Theory 2010-10-27 v2

Abstract

We address the problem of fair division, or cake cutting, with the goal of finding truthful mechanisms. In the case of a general measure space ("cake") and non-atomic, additive individual preference measures - or utilities - we show that there exists a truthful "mechanism" which ensures that each of the k players gets at least 1/k of the cake. This mechanism also minimizes risk for truthful players. Furthermore, in the case where there exist at least two different measures we present a different truthful mechanism which ensures that each of the players gets more than 1/k of the cake. We then turn our attention to partitions of indivisible goods with bounded utilities and a large number of goods. Here we provide similar mechanisms, but with slightly weaker guarantees. These guarantees converge to those obtained in the non-atomic case as the number of goods goes to infinity.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1003.5480,
  title  = {Truthful Fair Division},
  author = {Elchanan Mossel and Omer Tamuz},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1003.5480},
  year   = {2010}
}

Comments

10 pages

R2 v1 2026-06-21T15:03:46.453Z