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Abstract In the literature, many desirable properties for allocations of indivisible goods have been proposed, including envy-freeness, Pareto optimality, and maximization of either the total welfare of all agents, the welfare of the worst-off agent, or the Nash product of agents’ welfares. In the two-person context, we study relationships among these properties using both analytical models and simulation in a setting where individual preferences are given by additive cardinal utilities. We provide several new theorems linking these criteria and use simulation to study how their values are related to problem characteristics, assuming that utilities are assigned randomly. We draw some conclusions concerning the relation of problem characteristics to the availabilty of allocations with particular properties.
Kilgour et al. (Thu,) studied this question.