Bad News for Couples: Tight Lower Bounds for Fair Division of Indivisible Items

Fuente: arXiv
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Autor principal: la Tour, Max Dupré
Formato: Preprint
Publicado: 2026
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author la Tour, Max Dupré
author_facet la Tour, Max Dupré
contents We consider the problem of fairly allocating indivisible goods to couples, where each couple consists of two agents with distinct additive valuations. We show that there exist instances of allocating indivisible items to $n$ couples for which envy-freeness up to $Ω(\sqrt{n})$ items cannot be guaranteed. This closes the gap by matching the upper bound of Manurangsi and Suksompong, which applies to arbitrary instances with $n$ agents in total. This result is somewhat surprising, as that upper bound was conjectured not to be tight for instances consisting only of small groups.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2601_01012
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Bad News for Couples: Tight Lower Bounds for Fair Division of Indivisible Items
la Tour, Max Dupré
Computer Science and Game Theory
We consider the problem of fairly allocating indivisible goods to couples, where each couple consists of two agents with distinct additive valuations. We show that there exist instances of allocating indivisible items to $n$ couples for which envy-freeness up to $Ω(\sqrt{n})$ items cannot be guaranteed. This closes the gap by matching the upper bound of Manurangsi and Suksompong, which applies to arbitrary instances with $n$ agents in total. This result is somewhat surprising, as that upper bound was conjectured not to be tight for instances consisting only of small groups.
title Bad News for Couples: Tight Lower Bounds for Fair Division of Indivisible Items
topic Computer Science and Game Theory
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.01012