Obvious manipulations in cake-cutting

Abstract

In the classical cake-cutting problem, strategy-proofness is a very costly requirement in terms of fairness: for n= 2 it implies a dictatorial allocation, whereas for n≥ 3 it implies that one agent receives no cake. We show that a weaker version of this property recently suggested by Troyan and Morril (J Econ Theory 185:104970, 2019) is compatible with the fairness property of proportionality, which guarantees that each agent receives 1/n of the cake. Both properties are satisfied by the leftmost-leaves mechanism, an adaptation of the Dubins–Spanier moving knife procedure. Most other classical proportional mechanisms in the literature are obviously manipulable, including the original moving knife mechanism and some other variants of it.