Abstract. We investigate the problem of fairly allocating indivisible goods among interested agents using the concept of maximin share. Procaccia and Wang showed that while an allocation that gives every agent at least her maximin share does not necessarily exist, one that gives every agent at least 2/3 of her share always does. In this paper, we consider the more general setting where we allocate the goods to groups of agents. The agents in each group share the same set of goods even though they may have conflicting preferences. For two groups, we characterize the cardinality of the groups for which a positive approximation of the maximin share is possible regardless of the number of goods. We also show settings where an approximation is possible or impossible when there are several groups.
In particular, Suksompong REF investigated approximation guarantees for groups of agents using the maximin share criterion.
Approximate Maximin Shares for Groups of Agents
Mathematical Social Sciences, 92:40-47 (2018)
Mathematics Computer Science