Envy-Free Allocation of Indivisible Goods via Noisy Queries

arXiv:2602.06361v1 Announce Type: cross
Abstract: We introduce a problem of fairly allocating indivisible goods (items) in which the agents’ valuations cannot be observed directly, but instead can only be accessed via noisy queries. In the two-agent setting with Gaussian noise and bounded valuations, we derive upper and lower bounds on the required number of queries for finding an envy-free allocation in terms of the number of items, $m$, and the negative-envy of the optimal allocation, $Delta$. In particular, when $Delta$ is not too small (namely, $Delta gg m^{1/4}$), we establish that the optimal number of queries scales as $frac{sqrt m }{(Delta / m)^2} = frac{m^{2.5}}{Delta^2}$ up to logarithmic factors. Our upper bound is based on non-adaptive queries and a simple thresholding-based allocation algorithm that runs in polynomial time, while our lower bound holds even under adaptive queries and arbitrary computation time.