Online Fair Division: A Survey

We survey a burgeoning and promising new research area that considers the online nature of many practical fair division problems. We identify wide variety of such online fair division problems, as well as discuss new mechanisms and normative properties that apply to this online setting. The online nature of such fair division problems provides both opportunities and challenges such as the possibility to develop new online mechanisms as well as the difficulty of dealing with an uncertain future. Introduction Fair division (Brams and Taylor 1996) is an important problem facing society today as increasing economical, environmental, and other pressures require us to try to do more with limited resources. Much previous work in fair division assumes the problem is offline and fixed. That is, we suppose that the agents being allocated resources, and the resources being allocated to these agents are all known and fixed. But practical reality is often quite different (Walsh 2014a; 2015). Fair division problems are often online, with either the agents, or the resources to be allocated, or both not being fixed and potentially changing over time.