Adjusted winner procedure

Adjusted Winner (AW) is an algorithm for envy-free item allocation.

[3]: 69–88  Adjusted Winning was previously patented in the United States, but expired in 2016.

[4] Each party is given the list of goods and an equal, fixed number of points to distribute among them.

There are no cases of Adjusted Winner being used to resolve real-life disputes.

However, some studies have simulated how certain disputes would have resulted had the algorithm been used, including AW is not a truthful mechanism: a party can gain from spying on its opponent and modifying their reports in order to get a larger share.

It does not handle, for example, multiple instances of a good with diminishing marginal utilities.

[8] Any two of these three properties can be satisfied simultaneously: Moreover, it is possible to find an allocation that, while being Pareto-optimal/envy-free or Pareto-optimal/equitable, would minimize the number of objects that have to be shared between two or more parties.

This it usually considered the generalization of the Adjusted Winner procedure to three or more parties.

[11] Adjusted Winner is designed for agents with positive valuations over the items.

[12] The Brams–Taylor procedure was designed by the same authors, but it is instead a procedure for envy-free cake-cutting: it handles heterogeneous resources ("cake") which are more challenging to divide than Adjusted Winning's homogeneous goods.[how?]