The frontier of intractability for EFX with two agents

We consider the problem of sharing a set of indivisible goods among agents in a fair manner, namely such that the allocation is envy-free up to any good (EFX). We focus on the problem of computing an EFX allocation in the two-agent case and characterize the computational complexity of the problem fo...

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Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Goldberg, PW, Høgh, K, Hollender, A
Format: Conference item
Language:English
Published: Springer 2023
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Summary:We consider the problem of sharing a set of indivisible goods among agents in a fair manner, namely such that the allocation is envy-free up to any good (EFX). We focus on the problem of computing an EFX allocation in the two-agent case and characterize the computational complexity of the problem for most well-known valuation classes. We present a simple greedy algorithm that solves the problem when the agent valuations are weakly well-layered, a class which contains gross substitutes and budget-additive valuations. For the next largest valuation class we prove a negative result: the problem is PLS-complete for submodular valuations. All of our results also hold for the setting where there are many agents with identical valuations.