Publication Type
Working Paper
Version
publishedVersion
Publication Date
4-2021
Abstract
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.
Keywords
Indivisibility, fractional allocation, decomposability, maximum flow
Discipline
Economic Theory
Research Areas
Economic Theory
First Page
1
Last Page
20
Publisher
SMU Economics and Statistics Working Paper Series, Paper No. 03-2021
City or Country
Singapore
Citation
CHATTERJI, Shurojit and LIU, Peng.
On the decomposability of fractional allocations. (2021). 1-20.
Available at: https://ink.library.smu.edu.sg/soe_research/2493
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-No Derivative Works 4.0 International License.