# Temporal Fair Division

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2410.23416 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.23416/

## Key facts

- Cited by 8 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- First posted on arXiv 30 Oct 2024.

## Built on by (most cited first, 8 of 8)

- [Online Fair Division with Additional Information](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.24503/) (2025)
- [Not in My Backyard! Temporal Voting Over Public Chores](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.08810/) (2025)
- [Approximate Proportionality in Online Fair Division](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.03253/) (2025)
- [Online Fair Division for Personalized 2-Value Instances](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.22174/) (2025)
- [The Coordination Gap: Multi-Agent Alternation Metrics for Temporal Fairness in Repeated Games](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.05789/) (2026)
- [Credit Fairness: Online Fairness In Shared Resource Pools](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.17944/) (2026)
- [Temporal Fair Division in Multi-Agent Systems: From Precise Alternation Metrics to Scalable Coordination Proxies](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.14879/) (2026)
- [Online Fair Division with Budget Constraints](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.23310/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

We study temporal fair division, whereby a set of agents are allocated a (possibly different) set of goods on each day for a period of days. We study this setting, as well as a number of its special cases formed by the restrictions to two agents, same goods on each day, identical preferences, or combinations thereof, and chart out the landscape of achieving two types of fairness guarantees simultaneously: fairness on each day (per day) and fairness over time (up to each day, or the weaker version, overall). In the most general setting, we prove that there always exists an allocation that is stochastically-dominant envy-free up to one good (SD-EF1) per day and proportional up to one good (PROP1) overall, and when all the agents have identical preferences, we show that SD-EF1 per day and SD-EF1 overall can be guaranteed. For the case of two agents, we prove that SD-EF1 per day and EF1 up to each day can be guaranteed using an envy balancing technique. We provide counterexamples for other combinations that establish our results as among the best guarantees possible, but also leaving open some tantalizing questions.