Temporal Fair Division

TL;DR

This paper investigates fair division of goods over time among agents, establishing existence results for various fairness guarantees in general and special cases, and highlighting the complexity of achieving multiple fairness criteria simultaneously.

Contribution

It introduces new fairness guarantees for temporal division, proves their existence in general and special cases, and explores the limits of these guarantees.

Findings

Existence of allocations that are SD-EF1 per day and PROP1 overall.

Guarantees for two agents using envy balancing techniques.

Counterexamples showing limits of simultaneous fairness guarantees.

Abstract

We study temporal fair division, whereby a set of agents are allocated a (possibly different) set of goods on each day for a period of days. We study this setting, as well as a number of its special cases formed by the restrictions to two agents, same goods on each day, identical preferences, or combinations thereof, and chart out the landscape of achieving two types of fairness guarantees simultaneously: fairness on each day (per day) and fairness over time (up to each day, or the weaker version, overall). In the most general setting, we prove that there always exists an allocation that is stochastically-dominant envy-free up to one good (SD-EF1) per day and proportional up to one good (PROP1) overall, and when all the agents have identical preferences, we show that SD-EF1 per day and SD-EF1 overall can be guaranteed. For the case of two agents, we prove that SD-EF1 per day and EF1 up to each day can be guaranteed using an envy balancing technique. We provide counterexamples for other combinations that establish our results as among the best guarantees possible, but also leaving open some tantalizing questions.