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Econometrica Vol. 59 No. 4 1991

Fair Allocation of Indivisible Goods and Criteria of Justice

Ahmet Alkan1; Gabrielle Demange2; David Gale3

1 Department of Management · 2 École Polytechnique · 3 Department of Economics

Abstract

A set of n objects and an amount M of money is to be distributed among m people. Example: the objects are tasks and the money is compensation from a fixed budget. An elementary argument via constrained optimization shows that for M sufficiently large the set of efficient, envy free allocations is nonempty and has a nice structure. In particular, various criteria of justice lead to unique best fair allocations that are well behaved with respect to changes of M. This is in sharp contrast to the usual fair division theory with divisible goods.

DOI
10.2307/2938172
Volume
59
Issue
4
Pages
1023
Sources
bibtex:phds-export.bib crossref openalex

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