Auctions and barters

In this technical report we face the problem of the fair sharing of goods, bads and possibly services (also collectively termed items) among a set of players that cannot (or do not want to) use a common cardinal scale for their evaluation owing to the very qualitative and non economical nature of the items themselves. To solve this problem we present two families of protocols (barter protocols and auction protocols) and use a set of classical fairness criteria (mainly for barter protocols) and performance criteria (mainly for auction protocols) for their evaluation. The protocols are either based on auctions mechanisms or on barter mechanisms and are presented in detail, discussed and evaluated using the suitable fairness and performance criteria.