Strategic Behavior in Contested-Pile Methods for Fair Division of Indivisible Items

Rudolf Vetschera () and D. Marc Kilgour ()
Additional contact information
Rudolf Vetschera: University of Vienna
D. Marc Kilgour: Wilfrid Laurier University

Group Decision and Negotiation, 2013, vol. 22, issue 2, No 7, 299-319

Abstract: Abstract Most fair-division procedures are modeled on cake-cutting procedures such as “I cut, you choose”. The inputs are players’ choices, which are assumed to reflect preferences but not fully reveal them; the output is a division that is in some sense fair. However, it seems likely that decision makers sometimes behave insincerely, that is, they make choices that are not consistent with their true preferences. For example, strategic—as opposed to sincere—behavior may be aimed at taking advantage of information about an opponent’s preferences, which most fair-division procedures assume is not available. We focus on contested-pile procedures, a class of procedures for the fair division of indivisible items between two players, related to the alternation procedures proposed by Brams and Taylor (The win-win solution: guaranteeing fair shares to everybody. W. W. Norton, New York, 1999). We use computational models to assess the performance of these procedures under both sincere and strategic behavior. We show how available information about preferences can interact with strategy to shape outcomes. Our results indicate that strategic behavior, although it often changes outcomes, may not make them less efficient or less fair. Furthermore, our investigation suggests that how information about the opponents preference is processed does not have a strong impact, in that a conceptually simple strategy often outperforms a more elaborate one.

Keywords: Fair division; Contested pile; Strategic behavior (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2013
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)

Downloads: (external link)
http://link.springer.com/10.1007/s10726-011-9263-5 Abstract (text/html)
Access to the full text of the articles in this series is restricted.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:spr:grdene:v:22:y:2013:i:2:d:10.1007_s10726-011-9263-5

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.springer.com/journal/10726/PS2

DOI: 10.1007/s10726-011-9263-5

Access Statistics for this article

Group Decision and Negotiation is currently edited by Gregory E. Kersten

More articles in Group Decision and Negotiation from Springer
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().