Egalitarianism under earmark constraints

A homogeneous resource coming from several suppliers is divided among agents with singlepeaked preferences. Each agent has access to an arbitrary fixed subset of supliers. Examples include balancing the workload of machines, sharing earmarked funds between different projects, and distributing utilities under geographic constraints. Unlike in the one supplier model (Sprumont [25]), in a Pareto optimal allocation agents who get more than their peak coexist with agents who get less. A variant of the Gallai-Edmonds decomposition identifies the corresponding sets of over-demanded and under-demanded suppliers. Our Egalitarian solution is the Lorenz dominant Pareto optimal allocation. We characterize it by the combination of Strategyproofness, Pareto Optimality, and Equal Treatment of Equal Demands. The latter property ignores the differences in the agents’ access to suppliers, thus it does not hold them responsible for these constraints.