Two-player fair division of indivisible items: Comparison of algorithms

•We compare 11 fair division algorithms from literature.•We use both ordinal and Borda score criteria for comparison.•We perform an exhaustive computational study on all possible preference profiles.•This allows us also to identify cases in which algorithms fail. We study algorithms for allocating a...

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Bibliographic Details
Published inEuropean journal of operational research Vol. 271; no. 2; pp. 620 - 631
Main Authors Kilgour, D. Marc, Vetschera, Rudolf
Format Journal Article
LanguageEnglish
Published Elsevier B.V 01.12.2018
Subjects
Borda score
Computational study
Fair division
Indivisible items
Indivisible items
Fair division
Borda score
Computational study
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Summary:•We compare 11 fair division algorithms from literature.•We use both ordinal and Borda score criteria for comparison.•We perform an exhaustive computational study on all possible preference profiles.•This allows us also to identify cases in which algorithms fail. We study algorithms for allocating a set of indivisible items to two players who rank them differently. We compare eleven such algorithms, mostly taken from the literature, in a computational study, evaluating them according to fairness and efficiency criteria that are based on ordinal preferences as well as Borda counts. Our study is exhaustive in that, for every possible instance of up to twelve items, we compare the output of each algorithm to all possible allocations. We thus can search for “good” allocations that no algorithm finds. Overall, the algorithms do very well on ordinal properties but fall short on Borda properties. We also discuss the similarity of algorithms and suggest how they can be usefully combined.
ISSN:0377-2217
1872-6860
DOI:10.1016/j.ejor.2018.05.057