Fair Division with Binary Valuations: One Rule to Rule Them All
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Abstract (arXiv)
We study fair allocation of indivisible goods among agents. Prior research focuses on additive agent preferences, which leads to an impossibility when seeking truthfulness, fairness, and efficiency. We show that when agents have binary additive preferences, a compelling rule -- maximum Nash welfare (MNW) -- provides all three guarantees. Specifically, we show that deterministic MNW with lexicographic tie-breaking is group strategyproof in addition to being envy-free up to one good and Pareto optimal. We also prove that fractional MNW -- known to be group strategyproof, envy-free, and Pareto optimal -- can be implemented as a distribution over deterministic MNW allocations, which are envy-free up to one good. Our work establishes maximum Nash welfare as the ultimate allocation rule in the realm of binary additive preferences.
Key facts. Cited by 10 papers in the map (data through 7 Oct 2026). First posted on arXiv 12 Jul 2020.
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Citing papers per year: 2021: 1; 2022: 2; 2023: 0; 2024: 1; 2025: 4; 2026: 2.
10 papers.
- 2024Temporal Fair Division of Indivisible Itemscited by 11
- 2025Not in My Backyard! Temporal Voting Over Public Chorescited by 6
- 2021Allocating Indivisible Goods to Strategic Agents: Pure Nash Equilibria and Fairnesscited by 3
- 2022Yankee Swap: a Fast and Simple Fair Allocation Mechanism for Matroid Rank Valuationscited by 3
- 2025Understanding EFX Allocations: Counting and Variantscited by 3
- 2025Fairness in Repeated Matching: A Maximin Perspectivecited by 2
- 2026The Cost of EFX: Generalized-Mean Welfare and Complexity Dichotomies with Few Surplus Itemscited by 1
- 2022(Almost) Envy-Free, Proportional and Efficient Allocations of an Indivisible Mixed Mannacited by 0
- 2025Probing EFX via PMMS: (Non-)Existence Results in Discrete Fair Divisioncited by 0
- 2026Simultaneous Envy and Equitability Guaranteescited by 0
- 2026Simultaneous Envy and Equitability Guarantees26 Aug 2026
- 2026The Cost of EFX: Generalized-Mean Welfare and Complexity Dichotomies with Few Surplus Items19 Jan 2026
- 2025Fairness in Repeated Matching: A Maximin Perspective6 Oct 2025
- 2025Not in My Backyard! Temporal Voting Over Public Chores12 Aug 2025
- 2025Probing EFX via PMMS: (Non-)Existence Results in Discrete Fair Division20 Jul 2025
- 2025Understanding EFX Allocations: Counting and Variants4 Apr 2025
- 2024Temporal Fair Division of Indivisible Items18 Oct 2024
- 2022Yankee Swap: a Fast and Simple Fair Allocation Mechanism for Matroid Rank Valuations17 Jun 2022
- 2022(Almost) Envy-Free, Proportional and Efficient Allocations of an Indivisible Mixed Manna6 Feb 2022
- 2021Allocating Indivisible Goods to Strategic Agents: Pure Nash Equilibria and Fairness17 Sep 2021