Closing Gaps in Online Fair Division

Abstract: We study the online fair division of indivisible items, where items arrive one at a time and must be allocated immediately and irrevocably. We address three central open questions in the literature. First, we show that no online algorithm can guarantee any positive multiplicative approximation to proportionality up to any $k$ goods (PROP$k$) against an adaptive adversary. This remains true even when the total number of goods is known in advance, all values lie in $[0,1]$, and every good is positively valued by at most two agents. This impossibility extends to a broad range of standard envy-based, proportionality-based, and share-based notions currently studied in the literature. We also establish the analogous impossibility for chores. Second, in the setting with predictions, a lightweight prediction of the maximum item value was previously known to give $1/n$-PROP1, leaving open whether the dependence on $n$ is necessary. We give a deterministic $1/2$-PROP1 algorithm against adaptive adversaries. More generally, if the algorithm is given an upper bound $κ\in[2,n]$ on the number of agents who value any good positively, the guarantee improves to $n/(n+κ)$ and remains constant under one-sided prediction error. When the total number of goods ($m$) is known in advance and $m\ge n\log n$, we further give, for every fixed $β\in(0,1/2)$, a deterministic algorithm that simultaneously guarantees $β$-PROP1 and $O(\sqrt{m\log n/n})$ maximum additive envy after normalizing each agent's values by their maximum item value. Third, against a non-adaptive adversary, we determine the tight high-probability PROP1 guarantee of the classical Like rule, which assigns each good uniformly among the agents who value it positively. Unlike uniform random allocation, its guarantee improves when fewer agents value the same good.