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We study the problem of distributing a set of indivisible goods among agents with additive valuations in afairmanner. The fairness notion under consideration is envy-freeness up toanygood (EFX). Despite significant efforts by many researchers for several years, the existence of EFX allocations has not been settled beyond the simple case of two agents. In this article, we show constructively that an EFX allocation always exists for three agents. Furthermore, we falsify the conjecture of Caragiannis et al. by showing an instance with three agents for which there is a partial EFX allocation (some goods are not allocated) with higher Nash welfare than that of any complete EFX allocation.
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This content will become publicly available on November 1, 2025
Improving Envy Freeness up to Any Good Guarantees Through Rainbow Cycle Number
We study the problem of fairly allocating a set of indivisible goods among n agents with additive valuations. Envy freeness up to any good (EFX) is arguably the most compelling fairness notion in this context. However, the existence of an EFX allocation has not been settled and is one of the most important problems in fair division. Toward resolving this question, many impressive results show the existence of its relaxations. In particular, it is known that 0.618-EFX allocations exist and that EFX allocation exists if we do not allocate at most (n-1) goods. Reducing the number of unallocated goods has emerged as a systematic way to tackle the main question. For example, follow-up works on three- and four-agents cases, respectively, allocated two more unallocated goods through an involved procedure. In this paper, we study the general case and achieve sublinear numbers of unallocated goods. Through a new approach, we show that for every [Formula: see text], there always exists a [Formula: see text]-EFX allocation with sublinear number of unallocated goods and high Nash welfare. For this, we reduce the EFX problem to a novel problem in extremal graph theory. We define the notion of rainbow cycle number [Formula: see text] in directed graphs. For all [Formula: see text] is the largest k such that there exists a k-partite graph [Formula: see text], in which each part has at most d vertices (i.e., [Formula: see text] for all [Formula: see text]); for any two parts Viand Vj, each vertex in Vihas an incoming edge from some vertex in Vjand vice versa; and there exists no cycle in G that contains at most one vertex from each part. We show that any upper bound on [Formula: see text] directly translates to a sublinear bound on the number of unallocated goods. We establish a polynomial upper bound on [Formula: see text], yielding our main result. Furthermore, our approach is constructive, which also gives a polynomial-time algorithm for finding such an allocation. Funding: J. Garg was supported by the Directorate for Computer and Information Science and Engineering [Grant CCF-1942321]. R. Mehta was supported by the Directorate for Computer and Information Science and Engineering [Grant CCF-1750436].
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- PAR ID:
- 10572379
- Publisher / Repository:
- Mathematics of Operations Research (MOR)
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- Mathematics of Operations Research
- Volume:
- 49
- Issue:
- 4
- ISSN:
- 0364-765X
- Page Range / eLocation ID:
- 2323 to 2340
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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