Strategic Behavior when Allocating Indivisible Goods Sequentially

Authors

  • Thomas Kalinowski University of Rostock
  • Nina Narodytska NICTA and University of New South Wales
  • Toby Walsh NICTA and University of New South Wales
  • Lirong Xia Harvard University

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.1609/aaai.v27i1.8697

Keywords:

fair division, indivisible goods, Nash equilibrium

Abstract

We study a simple sequential allocation mechanism for allocating indivisible goods between agents in which agents take turns to pick items.We focus on agents behaving strategically. We view the allocation procedure as a finite repeated game with perfect information. We show that with just two agents, we can compute the unique subgame perfect Nash equilibrium in linear time. With more agents, computing the subgame perfect Nash equilibria is more difficult. There can be an exponential number of equilibria and computing even one of them is PSPACE-hard. We identify a special case, when agents value many of the items identically, where we can efficiently compute the subgame perfect Nash equilibria. We also consider the effect of externalities and modifications to the mechanism that make it strategy proof.

AAAI 2013 Proceedings Cover

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Published

2013-06-30

How to Cite

Kalinowski, T., Narodytska, N., Walsh, T., & Xia, L. (2013). Strategic Behavior when Allocating Indivisible Goods Sequentially. Proceedings of the AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence, 27(1), 452-458. https://doi.org/10.1609/aaai.v27i1.8697

Issue

Vol. 27 No. 1 (2013): Twenty-Seventh AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence

Section

Main Technical Papers