On Low-Envy Truthful Allocations

We study the problem of allocating a set of indivisible items to players having additive utility functions over the items. We consider allocations in which no player envies the bundle of items allocated to the other players too much. We present a simple proof that deterministic truthful allocations do not minimize envy by characterizing the truthful mechanisms for two players and two items. Also, we present an analysis for uniformly random allocations which are naturally truthful in expectation. These results simplify or improve previous results of Lipton et al.

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2009
• Where: ALDT
• Authors: Ioannis Caragiannis, Christos Kaklamanis, Panagiotis Kanellopoulos, Maria Kyropoulou
• Keywords: ALDT 2009, Algorithms, Deterministic Truthful Allocations, Indivisible Items, Truthful