Simultaneous Ordinal Maximin Share and Envy-Based Guarantees
It advances the theoretical understanding of combining share-based and envy-based fairness in indivisible goods allocation, addressing a gap in the literature.
The paper establishes the existence of allocations that simultaneously satisfy ordinal approximations of maximin share (MMS) and envy-based fairness (EFX or EF1) for additive valuations, providing specific guarantees for ordered and top-n instances.
We study the fair allocation of indivisible goods among agents with additive valuations. The fair division literature has traditionally focused on two broad classes of fairness notions: envy-based notions and share-based notions. Within the share-based framework, most attention has been devoted to the maximin share (MMS) guarantee and its relaxations, while envy-based fairness has primarily centered on EFX and its relaxations. Recent work has shown the existence of allocations that simultaneously satisfy multiplicative approximate MMS and envy-based guarantees such as EF1 or EFX. Motivated by this line of research, we study for the first time the compatibility between ordinal approximations of MMS and envy-based fairness notions. In particular, we establish the existence of allocations satisfying the following combined guarantees: (i) simultaneous $1$-out-of-$\lceil 3n/2 \rceil$ MMS and EFX for ordered instances; (ii) simultaneous $1$-out-of-$\lceil 3n/2 \rceil$ MMS and EF1 for top-$n$ instances; and (iii) simultaneous $1$-out-of-$4\lceil n/3 \rceil$ MMS and EF1 for ordered instances.