Fair Allocation of Indivisible Goods and Money and Criteria of Justice

Gabrielle Demange (1) , Ahmet Alkan (2) , David Gale (3)

1 CECO - Laboratoire d'économétrie de l'École polytechnique
2 Department of Management
3 Department of Economics [Berkeley]

A set of n objects and an amount M of money is to be distributed among m people. Example: the objects are tasks and the money is compensation from a fixed budget. An elementary argument via constrained optimization shows that for M sufficiently large the set of efficient, envy free allocations is nonempty and has a nice structure. In particular, various criteria of justice lead to unique best fair allocations that are well behaved with respect to changes of M. This is in sharp contrast to the usual fair division theory with divisible goods.

Mots clés: Fairness; envy-free; Pareto efficient; justice; Rawlsian justice

Domaines: Economies et finances

Gabrielle Demange, Ahmet Alkan, David Gale. Fair Allocation of Indivisible Goods and Money and Criteria of Justice. Econometrica, 1991, 59 (4), pp.1023-1039. ⟨halshs-00670945⟩