Dividing Goods and Bads Under Additive Utilities

NRU Higher School of Economics , 2016. No. 153.

Bogomolnaia A., Moulin H., Sandomirskiy F., Yanovskaya E. B.

When utilities are additive, we uncovered in our previous paper (Dividing Goods or Bads Under Additive Utilities) many similarities but also surprising dierences in the behavior of the familiar Competitive rule (with equal incomes), when we divide (private) goods or bads. The rule picks in both cases the critical points of the product of utilities (or disutilities) on the eciency frontier, but there is only one such point if we share goods, while there can be exponentially many in the case of bads.   We extend this analysis to the fair division of mixed items: each item can be viewed by some participants as a good and by others as a bad, with corresponding positive or negative marginal utilities. We nd that the division of mixed items boils down, normatively as well as computationally, to a variant of an all goods problem, or of an all bads problem: in particular the task of dividing the non disposable items must be either good news for everyone, or bad news for everyone.   If at least one feasible utility prole is positive, the Competitive rule picks the unique maximum of the product of (positive) utilities. If no feasible utility prole is positive, this rule picks all critical points of the product of disutilities on the ecient frontier.

Keywords: competitive equilibrium with equal incomes, Nash product, envy-freeness, конкуррентное равновесие с равными доходами, произведение Нэша, отсутствие зависти, fair division of goods and bads, задачи справедливого распределения благ и антиблаг

Publication based on the results of: Algorithmic aspects of fair division problems (2016)