Papers › Efficient Fair Division with Minimal Sharing

Efficient Fair Division with Minimal Sharing

5 Aug 2019arXiv:1908.01669links table onlyarchive 2025-07-28

Fedor Sandomirskiy, Erel Segal-Halevi

The archive published only this paper's code-link row. Authors, date and abstract are from arXiv's metadata (CC0), read from the Kaggle arXiv metadata snapshot of 2026-09-12 where its title matched the archive's; the title is the archive's.

A collection of objects, some of which are good and some are bad, is to be divided fairly among agents with different tastes, modeled by additive utility functions. If the objects cannot be shared, so that each of them must be entirely allocated to a single agent, then a fair division may not exist. What is the smallest number of objects that must be shared between two or more agents in order to attain a fair and efficient division? In this paper, fairness is understood as proportionality or envy-freeness, and efficiency, as fractional Pareto-optimality. We show that, for a generic instance of the problem (all instances except a zero-measure set of degenerate problems), a fair fractionally Pareto-optimal division with the smallest possible number of shared objects can be found in polynomial time, assuming that the number of agents is fixed. The problem becomes computationally hard for degenerate instances, where agents' valuations are aligned for many objects.

Code

Repository list and official/mentioned flags are the archive's, frozen 2025-07-28. Reachability, where shown, is from one Syntology probe window (2026-09-16 to 2026-09-18); repositories not probed show nothing. GitHub stars are not tracked.

Code Syntology ran Syntology

Not run by Syntology. Nothing on this page verifies that the listed code works.

Results from the paper archive 2025-07-28

No leaderboard rows for this paper in the archive.

Report a problem or propose a change · a person checks every report against the paper or source before anything changes; decisions are listed on /corrections