Prof. Meirav Zehavi

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Parameterized complexity of incomplete connected fair division

Harmender Gahlawat, Meirav Zehavi

Fair division of resources among competing agents is a fundamental problem in computational social choice and game theory. It has been intensively studied for various types of items (divisible and indivisible) and under various notions of fairness. We focus on Connected Fair Division (), the variant of fair division on graphs, where the resources are modeled as an item graph. Here, each agent has to be assigned a connected subgraph of the item graph, and each item has to be assigned to some agent. We introduce a generalization of, termed Incomplete (), where exactly p vertices of the item graph should be assigned to the agents. This might be useful, in particular when the allocations are intended to be “economical” as well as fair. We consider four well-known notions of fairness:,,,. First, we prove that -, -, and - are W[1]-hard parameterized by p plus the number of agents, even for graphs having constant vertex cover number (). In contrast, we present a randomized algorithm for - parameterized only by p. Additionally, we prove both positive and negative results concerning the kernelization complexity of under all four fairness notions, parameterized by p,, and the total number of different valuations in the item graph ().

Publication language English
Journal Autonomous Agents and Multi-Agent Systems
Volume 40
Issue number 2
Publication status Published - 01.12.2026
34

ASJC Scopus subject areas

Artificial Intelligence
Access to Document
10.1007/s10458-026-09760-w
Other files and links
Link to publication in Scopus