Designing Truthful Mechanisms for Asymptotic Fair Division

TL;DR

This paper develops a truthful, efficient mechanism for asymptotic fair division that guarantees envy-free allocations with high probability, even under complex value distributions among strategic agents.

Contribution

It introduces a new randomized, truthful mechanism for fair division that works with broader value distributions and extends to weighted and multi-type settings.

Findings

Envy-free allocations exist with high probability for m=Ω(n log n)

Proposed mechanism is truthful in expectation and polynomial-time implementable

Mechanism extends to weighted fair division and multi-type scenarios

Abstract

We study the problem of fairly allocating a set of $m$ goods among $n$ agents in the asymptotic setting, where each item's value for each agent is drawn from an underlying joint distribution. Prior works have shown that if this distribution is well-behaved, then an envy-free allocation exists with high probability when $m=\Omega(n\log{n})$ [Dickerson et al., 2014]. Under the stronger assumption that item values are independently and identically distributed (i.i.d.) across agents, this requirement improves to $m=\Omega(n\log{n}/\log{\log{n}})$, which is tight [Manurangsi and Suksompong, 2021]. However, these results rely on non-strategyproof mechanisms, such as maximum-welfare allocation or the round-robin algorithm, limiting their applicability in settings with strategic agents. In this work, we extend the theory to a broader, more realistic class of joint value distributions, allowing for correlations among agents, atomicity, and unequal probabilities of having the highest value for an item. We show that envy-free allocations continue to exist with a high probability when $m=\Omega(n\log{n})$. More importantly, we give a new randomized mechanism that is truthful in expectation, efficiently implementable in polynomial time, and outputs envy-free allocations with high probability, answering an open question posed by [Manurangsi and Suksompong, 2017]. We further extend our mechanism to settings with asymptotic weighted fair division and multiple agent types and good types, proving new results in each case.