{"title":"Truthful cake sharing","authors":"Xiaohui Bei, Xinhang Lu, Warut Suksompong","doi":"10.1007/s00355-023-01503-0","DOIUrl":null,"url":null,"abstract":"<p>The classic cake cutting problem concerns the fair allocation of a heterogeneous resource among interested agents. In this paper, we study a public goods variant of the problem, where instead of competing with one another for the cake, the agents all share the same subset of the cake which must be chosen subject to a length constraint. We focus on the design of truthful and fair mechanisms in the presence of strategic agents who have piecewise uniform (i.e., approval) utilities over the cake. On the one hand, we show that the leximin solution is excludably truthful (meaning it is truthful when it can block each agent from accessing parts of the cake that the agent does not claim to desire) and moreover maximizes the guaranteed normalized egalitarian welfare among all excludably truthful and position oblivious mechanisms. On the other hand, we demonstrate that the maximum Nash welfare solution is excludably truthful for two agents (as it coincides with leximin in that case) but not in general. We also provide an impossibility result on truthfulness when blocking is not allowed, and adapt notions of representation to our setting.</p>","PeriodicalId":47663,"journal":{"name":"Social Choice and Welfare","volume":"6 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.5000,"publicationDate":"2024-01-16","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":"0","resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":null,"PeriodicalName":"Social Choice and Welfare","FirstCategoryId":"96","ListUrlMain":"https://doi.org/10.1007/s00355-023-01503-0","RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"经济学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":null,"EPubDate":"","PubModel":"","JCR":"Q4","JCRName":"ECONOMICS","Score":null,"Total":0}
引用次数: 0
Abstract
The classic cake cutting problem concerns the fair allocation of a heterogeneous resource among interested agents. In this paper, we study a public goods variant of the problem, where instead of competing with one another for the cake, the agents all share the same subset of the cake which must be chosen subject to a length constraint. We focus on the design of truthful and fair mechanisms in the presence of strategic agents who have piecewise uniform (i.e., approval) utilities over the cake. On the one hand, we show that the leximin solution is excludably truthful (meaning it is truthful when it can block each agent from accessing parts of the cake that the agent does not claim to desire) and moreover maximizes the guaranteed normalized egalitarian welfare among all excludably truthful and position oblivious mechanisms. On the other hand, we demonstrate that the maximum Nash welfare solution is excludably truthful for two agents (as it coincides with leximin in that case) but not in general. We also provide an impossibility result on truthfulness when blocking is not allowed, and adapt notions of representation to our setting.
期刊介绍:
Social Choice and Welfare explores all aspects, both normative and positive, of welfare economics, collective choice, and strategic interaction. Topics include but are not limited to: preference aggregation, welfare criteria, fairness, justice and equity, rights, inequality and poverty measurement, voting and elections, political games, coalition formation, public goods, mechanism design, networks, matching, optimal taxation, cost-benefit analysis, computational social choice, judgement aggregation, market design, behavioral welfare economics, subjective well-being studies and experimental investigations related to social choice and voting. As such, the journal is inter-disciplinary and cuts across the boundaries of economics, political science, philosophy, and mathematics. Articles on choice and order theory that include results that can be applied to the above topics are also included in the journal. While it emphasizes theory, the journal also publishes empirical work in the subject area reflecting cross-fertilizing between theoretical and empirical research. Readers will find original research articles, surveys, and book reviews.Officially cited as: Soc Choice Welf