 EFX for Additive Chores: Nonexistence, Pareto Incompatibility, and Bi-Valued ExistenceWentao He and Biaoshuai Tao Abstract: We consider the fair division problem of indivisible chores and resolve the long-standing open problem for the existence of EFX (envy-free up to any item) allocations with additive cost functions. We show that, even for tri-valued additive cost functions, for every $n\geq 4$, there exists an instance with $n$ agents where no EFX allocation exists. Our counterexample only uses three types of chores and two types of agents. The numbers of types for chores and agents are both tight: an EFX allocation is known to exist for one type of agents (i.e., with identical cost functions) or two types of chores. We then consider bi-valued instances. We show that, for every $n\geq 4$, there exists an instance with $n$ agents where every EFX allocation is not Pareto-optimal. This is also the first example showing the incompatibility of EFX and Pareto-optimality when the costs of items are positive: existing examples showing the incompatibility of EFX and Pareto-optimal exploit items with $0$ costs. Our result shows such an example exists even for bi-valued instances. The number of agents $n$ is also tight: for $n\leq 3$, it is known that EFX is compatible with Pareto-optimality. Finally, we also show that an EFX allocation is guaranteed to exist for $n=4$. Date: 2026-06, Revised 2026-07 Downloads: (external link) Related works: Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:arx:papers:2606.08872 Access Statistics for this paper More papers in Papers from arXiv.org |
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