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arXiv · 2609.35670

Truthful-in-Expectation Mechanism with Constant Maximin-Share Guarantee

Mengfan Ma·Biaoshuai Tao·Fangxiao Wang
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Abstract

We study the truthful and fair allocation of indivisible goods to $n$ strategic agents with additive valuations. Babaioff, Feige, and Manaker Morag [FOCS 2026] gave a randomized mechanism that uses only the agents' rankings of the goods, is truthful in expectation (TIE), and guarantees every agent $1/(H_{n-1}+2)=Θ(1/\log n)$ of her maximin share (MMS) in every realized allocation, where $H_{n-1}$ is the $(n-1)$th harmonic number; this is nearly the best possible with rankings alone. They conjectured that cardinal information allows TIE mechanisms to achieve a constant ex-post MMS guarantee. We confirm this conjecture: our TIE mechanism guarantees every agent at least $1/7$ of her MMS in every realized allocation; moreover, the mechanism is ex-ante envy-free and can be implemented in polynomial time. Our mechanism has two key technical ingredients, both of which may be of independent interest. The first is a truthful fractional allocation rule specifying each agent's probability of receiving each good: it favors each agent on her top $n-1$ goods and reduces her probability of receiving a good for each other agent who also ranks it among her top $n-1$ goods. The second is the balanced edge coloring: we decompose these probabilities into equally likely matchings from agents to high-value goods, those that alone meet an agent's guarantee, and balance these matchings in a fine-grained way without changing any marginal probability, so that every agent who receives no high-value good can obtain sufficient value from the remaining goods without over-allocating any good.

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Mengfan Ma, Biaoshuai Tao, Fangxiao Wang. 2026-09-28. Truthful-in-Expectation Mechanism with Constant Maximin-Share Guarantee. https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.35670

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