Strategy-proof allocation of multiple items between two agents without payments or priors
Proceedings of the 9th International Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems: volume 1 - Volume 1
On strategy-proof allocation without payments or priors
WINE'11 Proceedings of the 7th international conference on Internet and Network Economics
Mechanism design for fair division: allocating divisible items without payments
Proceedings of the fourteenth ACM conference on Electronic commerce
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Consider the problem of allocating multiple divisible goods to two agents in a strategy-proof fashion without the use of payments or priors. Previous work has aimed at implementing allocations that are competitive with respect to an appropriately defined measure of social welfare. These results have mostly been negative, proving that no dictatorial mechanism can achieve an approximation factor better than 0.5, and leaving open the question of whether there exists a non-dictatorial mechanism that outperforms this bound. We provide a positive answer to this question by presenting an interesting non-dictatorial mechanism that achieves an approximation factor of 2/3 for this measure of social welfare. In proving this bound we also touch on the issue of fairness: we show that the proportionally fair solution, a well known fairness concept for money-free settings, is highly competitive with respect to social welfare. We then show how to use the proportionally fair solution to design our non-dictatorial strategy-proof mechanism.