Fair Division Procedures for the CREA project

We present two general purpose procedures that are simple and powerful enough to be used by specialists as well as common EU citizens without specific training on the subject matter. In the first procedure, that we name “Name your price”, available even without an estimated market value for the goods to preliminary agree upon is an adaptation of the Competitive/Nash solution for bargaining problems. Here, the users (agents) will simply have to express their preferences as bids on the items to divide. In the second one, named “Price and rate” users will have to express a rating on a simple discrete scale on which to express their satisfaction/dissatisfaction upon the possibility of receiving the items. The scale can be coarser or more refined, depending on the ability of the users to deal with such scales, and their familiarity with the goods to be distributed. Regarding the solutions, we build upon very recent scientific findings that guarantee for the solution of the first procedure its (Pareto) efficiency (no other allocation is at least as good for every agent and strictly better for at least one agent) and its envy-freeness (no agent prefers the share of another agent to her own). Regarding the solution of the second procedure, we focus on the efficiency and the equality in the users’ satisfaction, but also on another notion of high practical relevance, namely the comparison of the bundles’ market values, a common condition often imposed by the law. Both procedures satisfy invariance properties that discourage the parties from altering their preferences with the goal of gaining from this manipulation at the expense of the other participants in the division. The procedures are applied to real instances of inheritances, divorces and liquidations presented within the project by the team of legal experts.