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arXiv · 2610.09610

Envy-free Allocations with Individual Payments

Robert Bredereck·Eva Deltl·Tanmay Inamdar·Pallavi Jain·Pranjal Pandey
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Abstract

When an envy-free allocation of indivisible goods does not exist, monetary transfers can restore envy-freeness. Existing work on fair division with subsidies, however, typically assumes that these payments are provided by an external source, an assumption that may be unrealistic in many applications. We address this limitation by allowing only monetary transfers between agents, with each agent's payments constrained by their individual budget. We show that while it is polynomial-time tractable to determine whether a given allocation can be made envy-free by payments under individual budgets, the general problem of computing such an allocation from scratch is NP-hard, even when agents have relatively large budgets. Motivated by this intractability, we conduct a parameterized complexity analysis, establishing fixed-parameter tractability with respect to the number of goods or to the joint parameter number of agents and good types, and we provide efficient algorithms in several special cases. For explicitly listed items, our type-based algorithm answers the envy-freeness part of an open question of T. T. Nguyen and J. Rothe, "Complexity Results and Exact Algorithms for Fair Division of Indivisible Items: A Survey."

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Robert Bredereck, Eva Deltl, Tanmay Inamdar, Pallavi Jain, Pranjal Pandey. 2026-10-07. Envy-free Allocations with Individual Payments. https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.09610

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