Deterministic, Strategyproof, and Fair Cake Cutting

Deterministic, Strategyproof, and Fair Cake Cutting

Vijay Menon, Kate Larson

Proceedings of the Twenty-Sixth International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence
Main track. Pages 352-358. https://doi.org/10.24963/ijcai.2017/50

We study the classic cake cutting problem from a mechanism design perspective, in particular focusing on deterministic mechanisms that are strategyproof and fair. We begin by looking at mechanisms that are non-wasteful and primarily show that for even the restricted class of piecewise constant valuations there exists no direct-revelation mechanism that is strategyproof and even approximately proportional. Subsequently, we remove the non-wasteful constraint and show another impossibility result stating that there is no strategyproof and approximately proportional direct-revelation mechanism that outputs contiguous allocations, again, for even the restricted class of piecewise constant valuations. In addition to the above results, we also present some negative results when considering an approximate notion of strategyproofness, show a connection between direct-revelation mechanisms and mechanisms in the Robertson-Webb model when agents have piecewise constant valuations, and finally also present a (minor) modification to the well-known Even-Paz algorithm that has better incentive-compatible properties for the cases when there are two or three agents.
Keywords:
Agent-based and Multi-agent Systems: Economic paradigms, auctions and market-based systems
Agent-based and Multi-agent Systems: Social Choice Theory