Obvious manipulations in cake-cutting

Josue Ortega and Erel Segal-Halevi

No 19-056, ZEW Discussion Papers from ZEW - Leibniz Centre for European Economic Research

Abstract: In cake-cutting, strategy-proofness is a very costly requirement in terms of fairness: for n = 2 it implies a dictatorial allocation, whereas for n Ï 3 it requires that one agent receives no cake. We show that a weaker version of this property recently suggested by Troyan and Morril, called not-obvious manipulability, is compatible with the strong fairness property of proportionality, which guarantees that each agent receives 1/n of the cake. Both properties are satisfied by the leftmost leaves mechanism, an adaptation of the Dubins - Spanier moving knife procedure. Most other classical proportional mechanisms in literature are obviously manipulable, including the original moving knife mechanism. Not-obvious manipulability explains why leftmost leaves is manipulated less often in practice than other proportional mechanisms.

Keywords: cake-cutting; not-obvious manipulability; prior-free mechanism design (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D63 D82 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2019
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-des and nep-gth
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (3)

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Related works:
Journal Article: Obvious manipulations in cake-cutting (2022)
Working Paper: Obvious Manipulations in Cake-Cutting (2020)
Working Paper: Obvious Manipulations in Cake-Cutting (2019)
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:zbw:zewdip:19056

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