Information Theoretic cutting of a cake
Payam Delgosha, Amin Gohari

TL;DR
This paper applies information theory to analyze fair division algorithms like 'divide and choose' and 'adjusted winner', exploring the role of partial information, implicit communication, and welfare maximization in resource allocation.
Contribution
It introduces an information-theoretic perspective to fair division, analyzing negotiation benefits, implicit information transmission, and welfare optimization in resource allocation algorithms.
Findings
Quantifies negotiation benefits in divide and choose.
Analyzes implicit information transmission via actions.
Provides an upper bound on welfare increase in clustering.
Abstract
Cutting a cake is a metaphor for the problem of dividing a resource (cake) among several agents. The problem becomes non-trivial when the agents have different valuations for different parts of the cake (i.e. one agent may like chocolate while the other may like cream). A fair division of the cake is one that takes into account the individual valuations of agents and partitions the cake based on some fairness criterion. Fair division may be accomplished in a distributed or centralized way. Due to its natural and practical appeal, it has been a subject of study in economics. To best of our knowledge the role of partial information in fair division has not been studied so far from an information theoretic perspective. In this paper we study two important algorithms in fair division, namely "divide and choose" and "adjusted winner" for the case of two agents. We quantify the benefit of…
Peer Reviews
No public reviews on file for this paper yet. If you reviewed it on a platform where reviews are public (OpenReview, ICLR, NeurIPS, ICML), you can paste yours below so the community can read it here.
Videos
No videos yet. Explain this paper in a talk, walkthrough, or lecture? Add one.
