Existence and Computation of Fair Allocations under Constraints

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Barman, Siddharth, Caragiannis, Ioannis, Shyam, Sudarshan
Format: Preprint
Published: 2026
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author Barman, Siddharth
Caragiannis, Ioannis
Shyam, Sudarshan
author_facet Barman, Siddharth
Caragiannis, Ioannis
Shyam, Sudarshan
contents We study fair division of divisible goods under generalized assignment constraints. Here, each good has an agent-specific value and size, and every agent has a budget constraint that limits the total size of the goods she can receive. Since it may not always be feasible to assign all goods to the agents while respecting the budget constraints, we use the construct of charity to accommodate the unassigned goods. In this constrained setting with charity, we obtain several new existential and computational results for feasible envy-freeness (FEF); this fairness notion requires that agents are envy-free, considering only budget-feasible subsets. First, we simplify and extend known existential results for FEF allocations. Then, we show that the space of FEF allocations has a non-convex structure. Next, using a fixed-point argument, we establish a novel guarantee that FEF can always be achieved with Pareto-optimality. Furthermore, we give an alternative proof of the fact that one cannot additionally obtain truthfulness in this context: There does not exist a mechanism that is simultaneously truthful, fair, and Pareto-optimal. On the positive side, we show that truthfulness is compatible with each of FEF and Pareto-optimality, individually.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2603_00411
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Existence and Computation of Fair Allocations under Constraints
Barman, Siddharth
Caragiannis, Ioannis
Shyam, Sudarshan
Computer Science and Game Theory
We study fair division of divisible goods under generalized assignment constraints. Here, each good has an agent-specific value and size, and every agent has a budget constraint that limits the total size of the goods she can receive. Since it may not always be feasible to assign all goods to the agents while respecting the budget constraints, we use the construct of charity to accommodate the unassigned goods. In this constrained setting with charity, we obtain several new existential and computational results for feasible envy-freeness (FEF); this fairness notion requires that agents are envy-free, considering only budget-feasible subsets. First, we simplify and extend known existential results for FEF allocations. Then, we show that the space of FEF allocations has a non-convex structure. Next, using a fixed-point argument, we establish a novel guarantee that FEF can always be achieved with Pareto-optimality. Furthermore, we give an alternative proof of the fact that one cannot additionally obtain truthfulness in this context: There does not exist a mechanism that is simultaneously truthful, fair, and Pareto-optimal. On the positive side, we show that truthfulness is compatible with each of FEF and Pareto-optimality, individually.
title Existence and Computation of Fair Allocations under Constraints
topic Computer Science and Game Theory
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.00411