Online Fair Division: analysing a Food Bank problem

TL;DR

This paper examines online fair division mechanisms for a food bank scenario, analyzing their strategic properties and efficiency through axiomatic and competitive analysis.

Contribution

It introduces and analyzes simple online mechanisms for fair division in a charity context, focusing on strategy-proofness, envy-freeness, and efficiency measures.

Findings

Mechanisms are evaluated for strategy-proofness and envy-freeness.

Competitive analysis reveals bounds on efficiency loss.

Price of anarchy quantifies the worst-case inefficiency.

Abstract

We study an online model of fair division designed to capture features of a real world charity problem. We consider two simple mechanisms for this model in which agents simply declare what items they like. We analyse several axiomatic properties of these mechanisms like strategy-proofness and envy-freeness. Finally, we perform a competitive analysis and compute the price of anarchy.