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.

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?

In cooperation with a social startup, FoodBank Local, we have been helping Food Bank Australia develop technologies We study an online model of fair division designed to operate more effectively. So far, this has involved building to capture features of a real world charity problem.