Online Fair Division

Hunger is a major problem even in developed countries like Australia. We are working with a social startup, Foodbank Local, and local charities at distributing donated food more efficiently. This food must first be allocated to these charities and then delivered to the end customers. In this abstract, we give a formulation of this real-world online fair division problem that the food banks face every day. The products arrive during the day and are indivisible. As a very first step, we focus in here on designing simple mechanisms allocating the food more efficiently. In future, we also plan on investigating more closely the frontier between the allocation and the transportation frameworks within this mixed setting. For instance, shall we dispatch the items as soon as they arrive or shall we apply a given waiting strategy?