Cutting a Pie Is Not a Piece of Cake

Some Recent Results on Pie Cutting

For cake cutting, cuts are parallel to an axis or segment and yield rectangular pieces. As such, cutting a cake is viewed as dividing a line segment. For pie cutting, cuts are radial from the center of a disc to the circumference and yield sectors or wedge-shaped pieces. As such, cutting a pie is viewed as dividing a circle. This difference in topology is apparent in the minimal number of cuts ...

Cake-Cutting is Not a Pie e of Cake

Meta-envy-free Cake-cutting and Pie-cutting Protocols

This paper discusses cake-cutting protocols when the cake is a heterogeneous good, represented by an interval on the real line. We propose a new desirable property, the meta-envy-freeness of cake-cutting, which has not been formally considered before. Meta-envy-free means there is no envy on role assignments, that is, no party wants to exchange his/her role in the protocol with the one of any o...

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Fair cake-cutting is the division of a cake or resource among N users so that each user is content. Users may value a given piece of cake differently, and information about how a user values different parts of the cake can only be obtained by requesting users to “cut” pieces of the cake into specified ratios. Many distributed computing problems which involve resource sharing can be expressed as...

Cake-Cutting Is Not a Piece of Cake

Fair cake-cutting is the division of a cake or resource among N users so that each user is content. Users may value a given piece of cake differently, and information about how a user values different parts of the cake can only be obtained by requesting users to “cut” pieces of the cake into specified ratios. One of the most interesting open questions is to determine the minimum number of cuts ...

BetterWays to Cut a Cake

I n this paper we show how mathematics can illuminate the study of cake-cutting in ways that have practical implications. Specifically, we analyze cake-cutting algorithms that use a minimal number of cuts (n − 1 if there are n people), where a cake is a metaphor for a heterogeneous, divisible good, whose parts may be valued differently by different people. These algorithms not only establish th...