An Improved Lower Bound for Maximin Share Allocations of Goods

Abstract

The problem of fair division of indivisible goods has been receiving much attention recently. The prominent metric of envy-freeness can always be satisfied in the divisible goods setting (see for example \cite{BT95}), but often cannot be satisfied in the indivisible goods setting. This has led to many relaxations thereof being introduced. We study the existence of {\em maximin share (MMS)} allocations, which is one such relaxation. Previous work has shown that MMS allocations are guaranteed to exist for all instances with $n$ players and $m$ goods if $m \leq n+4$. We extend this guarantee to the case of $m = n+5$ and show that the same guarantee fails for $m = n+6$.