Allocating Indivisible Items in Categorized Domains

Abstract

We formulate a general class of allocation problems called categorized domain allocation problems (CDAPs), where indivisible items from multiple categories are allocated to agents without monetary transfer and each agent gets at least one item per category. We focus on basic CDAPs, where the number of items in each category is equal to the number of agents. We characterize serial dictatorships for basic CDAPs by a minimal set of three axiomatic properties: strategy-proofness, non-bossiness, and category-wise neutrality. Then, we propose a natural extension of serial dictatorships called categorial sequential allocation mechanisms (CSAMs), which allocate the items in multiple rounds: in each round, the active agent chooses an item from a designated category. We fully characterize the worst-case rank efficiency of CSAMs for optimistic and pessimistic agents, and provide a bound for strategic agents. We also conduct experiments to compare expected rank efficiency of various CSAMs w.r.t. random generated data.