Temporal Fair Division of Indivisible Goods with Scheduling

A new paper by Kui-Wang Choi and Minming Li, titled "Temporal Fair Division of Indivisible Goods with Scheduling," tackles the challenge of ensuring fairness when goods are distributed over time. The authors introduce temporal envy-freeness notions (TEF1, TEFX) and temporal maximin share (TMMS), and explore both restricted settings and scheduling mechanisms.

Without scheduling, the team proves that constant-factor α-TEFX is generally impossible, but a 1/2-approximation is achievable for generalized binary valuations with two agents on identical days. With scheduling, a buffer of size at least n/2 enables TEF1 for identical days, yet TEFX and TMMS remain largely impossible even with scheduling or restricted domains, highlighting the inherent difficulty of strict temporal fairness.