Obvious Manipulations in Cake-Cutting

Josue Ortega and Erel Segal-Halevi

No 2020/04, QBS Working Paper Series from Queen's University Belfast, Queen's Business School

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≥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: 2020
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.econstor.eu/bitstream/10419/271235/1/qms-rp2020-04.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: Obvious manipulations in cake-cutting (2022)
Working Paper: Obvious Manipulations in Cake-Cutting (2019)
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:zbw:qmsrps:202004

DOI: 10.2139/ssrn.3504487

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in QBS Working Paper Series from Queen's University Belfast, Queen's Business School Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by ZBW - Leibniz Information Centre for Economics ().