Obvious Manipulations in Cake-Cutting

Arbeitspapier

In cake-cutting, strategy-proofness is a very costly requirement in terms of fairness: for n = 2 it implies a dictatorial allocation, whereas for n≥3 it requires that one agent receives no cake. We show that a weaker version of this property recently suggested by Troyan and Morril, called not-obvious manipulability, is compatible with the strong fairness property of proportionality, which guarantees that each agent receives 1/n of the cake. Both properties are satisfied by the leftmost leaves mechanism, an adaptation of the Dubins - Spanier moving knife procedure. Most other classical proportional mechanisms in literature are obviously manipulable, including the original moving knife mechanism. Not-obvious manipulability explains why leftmost leaves is manipulated less often in practice than other proportional mechanisms.

Object Details

• Language: Englisch

References and Relationships

• Bibliographic citation: Series: QMS Research Paper ; No. 2020/04

Classification and Topics

• Classification: Wirtschaft ; Equity, Justice, Inequality, and Other Normative Criteria and Measurement ; Asymmetric and Private Information; Mechanism Design
• Subject: cake-cutting ; not-obvious manipulability ; prior-free mechanism design

Contributors, Places and Time

• Event: Geistige Schöpfung
• (who): Ortega, Josué ; Segal-Halevi, Erel
• Event: Veröffentlichung
• (who): Queen's University Belfast, Queen's Management School
• (where): Belfast
• (when): 2020

Further information

• DOI: doi:10.2139/ssrn.3504487
• Handle: http://hdl.handle.net/10419/271235
• Last update: 10.03.2025, 11:45 AM CET