On Lower Bounds for Maximin Share Guarantees

Abstract

We study the problem of fairly allocating a set of indivisible items to a set of agents with additive valuations. Recently, Feige et al. (WINE'21) proved that a maximin share (MMS) allocation exists for all instances with $n$ agents and no more than $n + 5$ items. Moreover, they proved that an MMS allocation is not guaranteed to exist for instances with $3$ agents and at least $9$ items, or $n \ge 4$ agents and at least $3n + 3$ items. In this work, we shrink the gap between these upper and lower bounds for guaranteed existence of MMS allocations. We prove that for any integer $c > 0$, there exists a number of agents $n_c$ such that an MMS allocation exists for any instance with $n \ge n_c$ agents and at most $n + c$ items, where $n_c \le \lfloor 0.6597^c \cdot c!\rfloor$ for allocation of goods and $n_c \le \lfloor 0.7838^c \cdot c!\rfloor$ for chores. Furthermore, we show that for $n \neq 3$ agents, all instances with $n + 6$ goods have an MMS allocation.