Efficient Fair Division with Minimal Sharing

Abstract

When assets are to be divided among several partners, for example, a partnership split, fair division theory can be used to determine a fair allocation. The applicability of existing approaches is limited as they either treat assets as divisible resources that end up being shared among participants or deal with indivisible objects providing only approximate fairness. In practice, sharing is often possible but undesirable, and approximate fairness is not adequate, particularly for highly valuable assets. In “Efficient Fair Division with Minimal Sharing,” Sandomirskiy and Segal-Halevi introduce a novel approach offering a middle ground: the number of shared objects is minimized while maintaining exact fairness and economic efficiency. This minimization can be conducted in polynomial time for generic instances if the number of agents or objects is fixed. Experiments on real data demonstrate a substantial improvement over current methods.