Epistemic fair division of independence structures

Abstract

We study the problem of fair division of indivisible goods with constraints imposed by a prescribed independence structure, that is, a family of subsets of goods closed under taking subsets. As a motivating example, imagine that the goods to be divided are the available connections in a logistic, financial, or social network. The admissible bundle of goods for each agent must correspond to an acyclic set of edges, corresponding to a basic feasible solution to a linear network problem to be solved. Suppose that all agents assign the same value to each good (in the example, the network connections are equally important for every agent) and evaluate each bundle by summing the values of its goods. Is there a fair partition of the goods into such acyclic bundles? Surprisingly, the answer is yes, provided that the number of agents is at least the arboricity of $G$, and the fairness requirement is envy-freeness up to one good (EF1). The situation becomes more mysterious when agents have arbitrary additive valuations. Our main result guarantees that, in this case, epistemic EF1 partitions always exist, which means that each agent receives an acyclic bundle for which there exists a feasible partition of the remaining goods into acyclic bundles that they do not envy up to one good. We derive this conclusion from a general result for abstract independence structures defined on the sets of goods. We also discuss connections with several conjectures concerning matroids. In particular, we prove that any Hamiltonian matroid partitionable into two independent sets admits an EF1 bipartition with respect to a common monotone valuation. We complement our results with a constructive perspective: we present explicitly two algorithms for computing the fair allocations described above. Finally, we provide illustrative examples to demonstrate these algorithms on specific instances.