A Social Welfare Optimal Sequential Allocation Procedure

TL;DR

This paper analyzes a sequential allocation method for indivisible items, demonstrating that alternating turns maximize expected social welfare and remain optimal even with strategic agents, with utilities computable efficiently.

Contribution

It proves that alternating turn allocation maximizes expected social welfare and that this mechanism is robust to strategic behavior, with utilities computable in polynomial time.

Findings

Expected utility per agent is polynomial-time computable.

Alternating turns maximize expected utilitarian social welfare.

Mechanism remains optimal under strategic agent behavior.

Abstract

We consider a simple sequential allocation procedure for sharing indivisible items between agents in which agents take turns to pick items. Supposing additive utilities and independence between the agents, we show that the expected utility of each agent is computable in polynomial time. Using this result, we prove that the expected utilitarian social welfare is maximized when agents take alternate turns. We also argue that this mechanism remains optimal when agents behave strategically