On the Decomposability of Fractional Allocations

Shurojit Chatterji () and Peng Liu ()
Additional contact information
Shurojit Chatterji: School of Economics, Singapore Management University
Peng Liu: East China Normal University

No 3-2021, Economics and Statistics Working Papers from Singapore Management University, School of Economics

Abstract: A common practice in dealing with the allocation of indivisible objects is to treat them as infinitely divisible and specify a fractional allocation, which is then implemented as a lottery on integer allocations that are feasible. The question we study is whether an arbitrary fractional allocation can be decomposed as a lottery on an arbitrary set of feasible integer allocations. The main result is a characterization of decomposable fractional allocations, that is obtained by transforming the decomposability problem into a maximum flow problem. We also provide a separate necessary condition for decomposability.

Keywords: Indivisibility; Fractional allocation; Decomposability; Maximum flow (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C78 D82 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 21 pages
Date: 2021-04-28
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-des and nep-sea
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://ink.library.smu.edu.sg/soe_working_paper/4/ Full text (text/plain)

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:ris:smuesw:2021_003

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Economics and Statistics Working Papers from Singapore Management University, School of Economics 90 Stamford Road, Sigapore 178903. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Cheong Pei Qi ( this e-mail address is bad, please contact ).