
A major part of the practical side of fair division is the devising and study of procedures that work well despite such partial knowledge or small mistakes.Īn additional requirement is that the fair division procedure be a truthful mechanism, i.e., it should be a dominant strategy for the participants to report their true valuations.

The case where they have complete knowledge of each other's valuations can be modeled by game theory. In the real world people sometimes have a very accurate idea of how the other players value the goods and they may care very much about it. See also efficient cake-cutting and the price of fairness. A division where one player gets everything is optimal by this definition so on its own this does not guarantee even a fair share. The term efficiency comes from the economics idea of the efficient market. In addition to fairness, it is sometimes desired that the division be Pareto optimal, i.e., no other allocation would make someone better off without making someone else worse off. See Proportional cake-cutting with different entitlements. If different participants have different entitlements (e.g., in a partnership where each partner invested a different amount), then the fairness criteria should be adapted accordingly. There are many different kinds of fair division problems, depending on the nature of goods to divide, the criteria for fairness, the nature of the players and their preferences, and other criteria for evaluating the quality of the division.įormally, a fair division problem is defined by a set C for all i and j.Īll the above criteria assume that the participants have equal entitlements. The research in fair division can be seen as an extension of this procedure to various more complex settings. It demonstrates that two agents with different tastes can divide a cake such that each of them believes that he got the best piece. The archetypal fair division algorithm is divide and choose. The central tenet of fair division is that such a division should be performed by the players themselves, maybe using a mediator but certainly not an arbiter as only the players really know how they value the goods.


This is an active research area in mathematics, economics (especially social choice theory), dispute resolution, and more. This problem arises in various real-world settings, such as: division of inheritance, partnership dissolutions, divorce settlements, electronic frequency allocation, airport traffic management, and exploitation of Earth observation satellites. In game theory, fair division is the problem of dividing a set of resources among several people who have an entitlement to them, such that each person receives their due share.
