Joseph Heath1 The Pareto principle states that if a proposed change in the condition of society makes at least one person better off, and does not make anyone else worse off, then that change should be regarded as an improvement. This principle forms the conceptual core of modern welfare economics, and exercises enormous influence in contemporary discussions of justice and equality. It does, ho...

There have been several interesting results in the literature on dividing up goods between self-interested parties such that the allocation is envy-free (Brams Taylor 1996). An allocation is deemed envy-free when every party (agent) believes that its share is not less than anyone else’s share. These procedures, however, are not efficient (in the sense of pareto optimality) general. Envy-free pr...

The fair division of indivisible goods is a very well-studied problem. goal this problem to distribute $m$ $n$ agents in “fair” manner, where every agent has valuation for each subset goods. We assume monotone valuations. Envy-freeness the most extensively studied notion fairness. However, envy-free allocations do not always exist when are indivisible. fairness we consider here “envy-freeness u...

Position auctions such as the Generalized Second Price (GSP) are commonly used for sponsored search, e.g., by Yahoo! and Google. We now have an understanding of the equilibria of these auctions, via game-theoretic concepts like Generalized English Auctions and the “locally envy-free” property, as well as through a relationship to the well-known, truthful Vickrey-Clarke-Groves (VCG) mechanism. I...

We study envy-free and truthful mechanisms for domains with additive valuations, like the ones that arise in scheduling on unrelated machines. We investigate the allocation functions that are both weakly monotone (truthful) and locally efficient (envy-free), in the case of only two tasks, but many players. We show that the only allocation functions that satisfy both conditions are affine minimi...

The problem of fairly dividing a cake (as a metaphor for a heterogeneous divisible good) has been the subject of much interest since the 1940’s, and is of importance in multiagent resource allocation. Two fairness criteria are usually considered: proportionality, in the sense that each of the n agents receives at least 1/n of the cake; and the stronger property of envy-freeness, namely that eac...

Matching with preferences has great potential to coordinate the efficient allocation of scarce resources in organizations when monetary transfers are not available. It is well known that it impossible combine all three properties truthfulness, efficiency, and fairness (i.e., envy freeness) matching preferences. Established mechanisms either or free, efficiency loss envy-free substantial. We foc...