Fairness under Equal-Sized Bundles: Impossibility Results and Approximation Guarantees

Abstract: We study the fair allocation of indivisible goods under cardinality constraints, where each agent must receive a bundle of fixed size. This models practical scenarios, such as assigning shifts or forming equally sized teams. Recently, variants of envy-freeness up to one/any item (EF1, EFX) were introduced for this setting, based on flips or exchanges of items. Namely, one can define envy-freeness up to one/any flip (EFF1, EFFX), meaning that an agent $i$ does not envy another agent $j$ after performing one or any one-item flip between their bundles that improves the value of $i$. We explore algorithmic aspects of this notion, and our contribution is twofold: we present both algorithmic and impossibility results, highlighting a stark contrast between the classic EFX concept and its flip-based analogue. First, we explore standard techniques used in the literature and show that they fail to guarantee EFFX approximations. On the positive side, we show that we can achieve a constant factor approximation guarantee when agents share a common ranking over item values, based on the well-known envy cycle elimination technique. This idea also leads to a generalized algorithm with approximation guarantees when agents agree on the top $n$ items and their valuation functions are bounded. Finally, we show that an algorithm that maximizes the Nash welfare guarantees a 1/2-EFF1 allocation, and that this bound is tight.