Please use this identifier to cite or link to this item: https://hdl.handle.net/10419/271235 
Year of Publication: 
2020
Series/Report no.: 
QMS Research Paper No. 2020/04
Publisher: 
Queen's University Belfast, Queen's Management School, Belfast
Abstract: 
In cake-cutting, strategy-proofness is a very costly requirement in terms of fairness: for n = 2 it implies a dictatorial allocation, whereas for n≥3 it requires that one agent receives no cake. We show that a weaker version of this property recently suggested by Troyan and Morril, called not-obvious manipulability, is compatible with the strong fairness property of proportionality, which guarantees that each agent receives 1/n of the cake. Both properties are satisfied by the leftmost leaves mechanism, an adaptation of the Dubins - Spanier moving knife procedure. Most other classical proportional mechanisms in literature are obviously manipulable, including the original moving knife mechanism. Not-obvious manipulability explains why leftmost leaves is manipulated less often in practice than other proportional mechanisms.
Subjects: 
cake-cutting
not-obvious manipulability
prior-free mechanism design
JEL: 
D63
D82
Persistent Identifier of the first edition: 
Document Type: 
Working Paper

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