Strategic fair division studies problems of fair division, in which participants cooperate to subdivide goods or resources fairly, from a point of view in which the participants are assumed to hide their preferences and act strategically in order to maximize their own utility, rather than playing sincerely according to their true preferences.
To illustrate the difference between strategic fair division and classic fair division, consider the divide and choose procedure for dividing a cake among two agents.
In classic fair division, it is assumed that the cutter cuts the cake into two pieces that are equal in his eyes, and thus he always gets a piece that he values at exactly 1/2 of the total cake value.
The research in strategic fair division has two main branches.
One branch is related to game theory and studies the equilibria in games created by fair division algorithms: The other branch is related to mechanism design and aims to find truthful mechanisms for fair division, in particular: