Strategy-proofness, envy-freeness and pareto efficiency in online fair division with additive utilities

Abstract

We consider fair division problems where indivisible items arrive one by one in an online fashion and are allocated immediately to agents who have additive utilities over these items. Many existing offline mechanisms do not work in this online setting. In addition, many existing axiomatic results often do not transfer from the offline to the online setting. For this reason, we propose here three new online mechanisms, as well as consider the axiomatic properties of three previously proposed online mechanisms. In this paper, we use these mechanisms and characterize classes of online mechanisms that are strategy-proof, and return envy-free and Pareto efficient allocations, as well as combinations of these properties. Finally, we identify an important impossibility result.