Approximate Competitive Equilibrium from Equal Incomes (A-CEEI) is a procedure for fair item assignment.
It divides the resources according to the outcome of the following hypothetical process: The equilibrium allocation is provably envy free and Pareto efficient.
[2] However, in realistic-size problems, A-CEEI can be computed using a two-level search process: The agent-level program can be done in parallel for all agents, so this method scales near-optimally in the number of processors.
[3] The mechanism has been considered for the task of assigning students to courses at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania.
[4] The Maximum-Nash-Welfare (MNW) algorithm finds an allocation that maximizes the product of the agents' utilities.
A-CEEI (and CEEI in general) is related, but not identical, to the concept of competitive equilibrium.