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Springer, Lecture Notes in Computer Science, p. 149-159, 2009

DOI: 10.1007/978-3-642-10841-9_15

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Degrees of Guaranteed Envy-Freeness in Finite Bounded Cake-Cutting Protocols

Journal article published in 2009 by Claudia Lindner ORCID, Joerg Rothe
This paper is available in a repository.
This paper is available in a repository.

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Abstract

Cake-cutting protocols aim at dividing a ``cake'' (i.e., a divisible resource) and assigning the resulting portions to several players in a way that each of the players feels to have received a ``fair'' amount of the cake. An important notion of fairness is envy-freeness: No player wishes to switch the portion of the cake received with another player's portion. Despite intense efforts in the past, it is still an open question whether there is a \emph{finite bounded} envy-free cake-cutting protocol for an arbitrary number of players, and even for four players. We introduce the notion of degree of guaranteed envy-freeness (DGEF) as a measure of how good a cake-cutting protocol can approximate the ideal of envy-freeness while keeping the protocol finite bounded (trading being disregarded). We propose a new finite bounded proportional protocol for any number n ≥ 3 of players, and show that this protocol has a DGEF of 1 + ⌈ (n^2)/2 ⌉. This is the currently best DGEF among known finite bounded cake-cutting protocols for an arbitrary number of players. We will make the case that improving the DGEF even further is a tough challenge, and determine, for comparison, the DGEF of selected known finite bounded cake-cutting protocols. ; Comment: 37 pages, 4 figures