IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/spr/sochwe/v19y2002i2p415-430.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

A simple procedure for finding equitable allocations of indivisible goods

Author

Listed:
  • Dorothea Herreiner

    (Department of Economics, University of Bonn, Adenauerallee 24-42, 53113 Bonn, Germany)

  • Clemens Puppe

    (Department of Economics, University of Bonn, Adenauerallee 24-42, 53113 Bonn, Germany)

Abstract

The paper investigates how far a particular procedure, called the "descending demand procedure," can take us in finding equitable allocations of indivisible goods. Both interpersonal and intrapersonal criteria of equitability are considered. It is shown that the procedure generally fares well on an interpersonal criterion of "balancedness"; specifically, the resulting allocations are Pareto-optimal and maximize the well-being of the worst-off individual. As a criterion of intrapersonal equitability, the property of envy-freeness is considered. To accommodate envy-freeness, a modification of the basic procedure is suggested. With two individuals, the modified procedure is shown to select the envy-free allocations that are balanced, i.e. the allocations that maximize the well-being of the worse-off individual among all envy-free allocations.

Suggested Citation

  • Dorothea Herreiner & Clemens Puppe, 2002. "A simple procedure for finding equitable allocations of indivisible goods," Social Choice and Welfare, Springer;The Society for Social Choice and Welfare, vol. 19(2), pages 415-430.
    • Handle: RePEc:spr:sochwe:v:19:y:2002:i:2:p:415-430
    Note: Received: 3 March 2000/Accepted: 27 November 2000
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://link.springer.de/link/service/journals/00355/papers/2019002/20190415.pdf
    Download Restriction: Access to the full text of the articles in this series is restricted
    ---><---

    As the access to this document is restricted, you may want to search for a different version of it.

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Steven J. Brams & D. Marc Kilgour & Christian Klamler, 2017. "Maximin Envy-Free Division of Indivisible Items," Group Decision and Negotiation, Springer, vol. 26(1), pages 115-131, January.
    2. Brams, Steven J. & Kilgour, D. Marc & Klamler, Christian, 2013. "Two-Person Fair Division of Indivisible Items: An Efficient, Envy-Free Algorithm," MPRA Paper 47400, University Library of Munich, Germany.
    3. Rudolf Vetschera & D. Marc Kilgour, 2013. "Strategic Behavior in Contested-Pile Methods for Fair Division of Indivisible Items," Group Decision and Negotiation, Springer, vol. 22(2), pages 299-319, March.
    4. Andreas Darmann & Christian Klamler, 2016. "Proportional Borda allocations," Social Choice and Welfare, Springer;The Society for Social Choice and Welfare, vol. 47(3), pages 543-558, October.
    5. Nhan-Tam Nguyen & Dorothea Baumeister & Jörg Rothe, 2018. "Strategy-proofness of scoring allocation correspondences for indivisible goods," Social Choice and Welfare, Springer;The Society for Social Choice and Welfare, vol. 50(1), pages 101-122, January.
    6. Brams, Steven J. & Kaplan, Todd R., 2017. "Dividing the indivisible: procedures for allocation cabinet ministries to political parties in a parlamentary system," Center for Mathematical Economics Working Papers 340, Center for Mathematical Economics, Bielefeld University.
    7. Dall'Aglio, Marco & Mosca, Raffaele, 2007. "How to allocate hard candies fairly," Mathematical Social Sciences, Elsevier, vol. 54(3), pages 218-237, December.
    8. Eve Ramaekers, 2013. "Fair allocation of indivisible goods: the two-agent case," Social Choice and Welfare, Springer;The Society for Social Choice and Welfare, vol. 41(2), pages 359-380, July.
    9. Thomson, William, 2011. "Chapter Twenty-One - Fair Allocation Rules," Handbook of Social Choice and Welfare, in: K. J. Arrow & A. K. Sen & K. Suzumura (ed.), Handbook of Social Choice and Welfare, edition 1, volume 2, chapter 21, pages 393-506, Elsevier.
    10. Brams,S.L. & Kaplan,T.R., 2002. "Dividing the indivisible : procedures for allocating cabinet ministries to political parties in a parliamentary system," Center for Mathematical Economics Working Papers 340, Center for Mathematical Economics, Bielefeld University.

    More about this item

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:spr:sochwe:v:19:y:2002:i:2:p:415-430. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Sonal Shukla or Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing (email available below). General contact details of provider: http://www.springer.com .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.