On the decomposability of fractional allocations

A common practice in dealing with the allocation of indivisible objects is to treat them as infinitely divisible and specify a fractional allocation, which is then implemented as a lottery on integer allocations that are feasible. The question we study is whether an arbitrary fractional allocation c...

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Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: CHATTERJI, Shurojit, LIU, Peng
Format: text
Language:English
Published: Institutional Knowledge at Singapore Management University 2021
Subjects:
Online Access:https://ink.library.smu.edu.sg/soe_research/2493
https://ink.library.smu.edu.sg/context/soe_research/article/3492/viewcontent/Decomposability_.pdf
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Institution: Singapore Management University
Language: English
Description
Summary:A common practice in dealing with the allocation of indivisible objects is to treat them as infinitely divisible and specify a fractional allocation, which is then implemented as a lottery on integer allocations that are feasible. The question we study is whether an arbitrary fractional allocation can be decomposed as a lottery on an arbitrary set of feasible integer allocations. The main result is a characterization of decomposable fractional allocations, that is obtained by transforming the decomposability problem into a maximum flow problem. We also provide a separate necessary condition for decomposability.