Envy-free Chore Division for An Arbitrary Number of Agents

Chore division, introduced by Gardner in 1970s [10], is the problem of fairly dividing a chore among n different agents. In particular, in an envy-free chore division, we would like to divide a negatively valued heterogeneous object among a number of agents who have different valuations for different parts of the object, such that no agent envies another agent. It is the dual variant of the celebrated cake cutting problem, in which we would like to divide a desirable object among agents. There has been an extensive amount of study and effort to design bounded and envy-free protocols/algorithms for fair division of chores and goods, such that envy-free cake cutting became one of the most important open problems in 20-th century mathematics according to Garfunkel [11]. However, despite persistent efforts, due to delicate nature of the problem, there was no bounded protocol known for cake cutting even among four agents, until the breakthrough of Aziz and Mackenzie [2], which provided the first discrete and bounded envy-free protocol for cake cutting for four agents. Afterward, Aziz and Mackenzie [3], generalized their work and provided an envy-free cake cutting protocol for any number of agents to settle a significant and longstanding open problem. However, there is much less known for chore division. Unfortunately, there is no general method known to apply cake cutting techniques to chore division. Thus, it remained an open problem to find a discrete and bounded envy-free chore division protocol even for four agents. In this paper, we provide the first discrete and bounded envy-free protocol for chore division for an arbitrary number of agents. We produce major and powerful tools for designing protocols for the fair division of negatively valued objects. These tools are based on structural results and important observations. In gen∗The omitted proofs can be found in the full version of this paper. †University of Maryland. Email: [email protected],{farhadi,hajiagha}@cs.umd.edu, [email protected] ‡Supported in part by NSF CAREER award CCF-1053605, NSF BIGDATA grant IIS-1546108, NSF AF:Medium grant CCF1161365, DARPA GRAPHS/AFOSR grant FA9550-12-1-0423, and another DARPA SIMPLEX grant. eral, we believe these structures and techniques may be useful not only in chore division but also in other fairness problems. Interestingly, we show that applying these techniques simplifies Core Protocol provided in Aziz and Mackenzie [3].