Title
On regular and approximately fair allocations of indivisible goods.
Abstract
An active stream of research is devoted to the design of polynomial approximation algorithms for the fair allocation of indivisible goods. Central to this field is the MaxMin Allocation problem, for which there is a significant gap between known approximation and inapproximability results. Closing this gap is a stimulating challenge. To this end, we consider a regular version of MaxMin Allocation where each agent must receive exactly k goods, for a given integer k. We call this problem k-division. The analysis of this problem allows us to highlight two interesting features of the classical MaxMin Allocation problem. First, we show a close connection of the problem with matroid theory. This connection provides us an exact algorithm for a special case of k-division and a 1/k-approximation algorithm for general inputs. Moreover, we show that the difficulty of the MaxMin Allocation may be caught by an apparently simpler problem, namely the k-division problem in which an agent's utility for a single good can only take one value out of three.
Year
DOI
Venue
2014
10.5555/2615731.2617405
AAMAS
Keywords
Field
DocType
simpler problem,classical maxmin allocation problem,maxmin allocation problem,problem k-division,close connection,k-division problem,exact algorithm,maxmin allocation,fair allocation,integer k,indivisible goods,economics,multiagent systems,approximation
Integer,Matroid,Approximation algorithm,Mathematical optimization,Polynomial,Exact algorithm,Computer science,Computational social choice,Multi-agent system,Special case
Conference
Citations 
PageRank 
References 
2
0.45
9
Authors
3
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Diodato Ferraioli19722.67
Laurent Gourvès224130.97
Jérôme Monnot351255.74