Fair division of goods in the shadow of market values

• Published in: European journal of operational research Vol. 307; no. 2; pp. 785 - 801
• Main Author: Dall’Aglio, Marco
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Elsevier B.V 01.06.2023
• Subjects: Divisible goods; Fair division; Group decision and negotiation; Private law; Fair division; Private law; Group decision and negotiation; Divisible goods
• ISSN: 0377-2217; 1872-6860
• DOI: 10.1016/j.ejor.2022.10.025

•Algorithm for the fair division with monetary value among agents with preferences.•Agents’ preferences elicited via a star rating system.•Allocations with different monetary value that give equal satisfaction.•Robust to small misspecifications of the parameters.•Easy to compute for the two agent’s case. Inheritances, divorces or liquidations of companies require common assets to be divided among the entitled parties. Legal methods usually consider the market value of goods, while fair division theory takes into account the parties’ preferences expressed as utilities. I combine the two practices to define a procedure that optimally allocates divisible goods with market values to people with easily elicited preferences. Imposing an exact equality onn the bundles’ monetary values may produce unacceptable solutions. I drop the tight requirement and suggest a procedure in which the differences in the monetary values are explained in terms of satisfaction per monetary share as perceived by the agents. A robustness study shows the consequences of misspecification in the model parameters.