Dynamic Fair Division with Minimal Disruptions

Abstract

In this paper we present an analysis of dynamic fair division of a divisible resource, with arrivals and departures of agents. Our key requirement is that we wish to disrupt the allocation of at most a small number of existing agents whenever a new agent arrives. We construct optimal recursive mechanisms to compute the allocations and provide tight analytic bounds. Our analysis relies on a linear programming formulation and a reduction of the feasible region of the LP into a class of "harmonic allocations", which play a key role in the trade-off between the fairness of current allocations and the fairness of potential future allocations. We show that there exist mechanisms that are optimal with respect to fairness and are also Pareto efficient, which is of fundamental importance in computing applications, as system designers loathe to waste resources. In addition, our mechanisms satisfy a number of other desirable game theoretic properties.