Maximin Share Allocations Beyond Weakly Lexicographic Valuations

Overview & Synopsis

We study the fair division of indivisible goods among agents with nonnegative additive valuations. An agent's maximin share (MMS) is the value she can guarantee by partitioning the goods into as many bundles as there are agents and receiving a least-valued bundle. We prove the existence of exact MMS allocations for a valuation domain that generalizes several few-valued domains as well as weakly lexicographic valuations. For each agent, the lower-valued goods, after a positive rescaling, may take values in $\{0,1,d,d+1\}$, $\{0,1,2,2e\}$, or $\{0,1,2,3,4\}$, where $d,e \ge 2$ are integers. Above these goods, the valuation may contain arbitrarily many value classes, subject to the condition that a single good in each class is worth at least the total value of all strictly lower-valued goods. The value classes, scaling factors, and parameters may vary across agents. We give an algorithm that computes an MMS allocation in $O(nm\log^2(2+m))$ time, where $n$ is the number of agents and $m$ is the number of goods.