Fair division in the age of the internet

Moulin, H. (2019) Fair division in the age of the internet. Annual Review of Economics, 11, pp. 407-441. (doi: 10.1146/annurev-economics-080218-025559)

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Abstract

Fair division, a key concern in the design of many social institutions, has for 70 years been the subject of interdisciplinary research at the interface of mathematics, economics, and game theory. Motivated by the proliferation of moneyless transactions on the internet, the computer science community has recently taken a deep interest in fairness principles and practical division rules. The resulting literature brings a fresh concern for computational simplicity (scalable rules) and realistic implementation. In this review of the most salient fair division results of the past 30 years, I concentrate on division rules with the best potential for practical implementation. The critical design parameter is the message space that the agents must use to report their individual preferences. A simple preference domain is key both to realistic implementation and to the existence of division rules with strong normative and incentive properties. I discuss successively the one-dimensional single-peaked domain, Leontief utilities, ordinal ranking, dichotomous preferences, and additive utilities. Some of the theoretical results in the latter domain are already implemented in the user-friendly SPLIDDIT platform (http://spliddit.org).

Item Type:Articles
Status:Published
Refereed:Yes
Glasgow Author(s) Enlighten ID:Moulin, Professor Herve
Authors: Moulin, H.
College/School:College of Social Sciences > Adam Smith Business School > Economics
Journal Name:Annual Review of Economics
Publisher:Annual Reviews
ISSN:1941-1383
ISSN (Online):1941-1391
Published Online:13 May 2019

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