Barter Exchange with Bounded Trading Cycles

Yuval Emek, Matan-El Shpiro

Abstract: Consider a barter exchange problem over a finite set of agents, where each agent owns an item and is also associated with a (privately known) wish list of items belonging to the other agents. An outcome of the problem is a (re)allocation of the items to the agents such that each agent either keeps her own item or receives an item from her (reported) wish list, subject to the constraint that the length of the trading cycles induced by the allocation is up-bounded by a prespecified length bound k. The utility of an agent from an allocation is 1 if she receives an item from her (true) wish list and 0 if she keeps her own item (the agent incurs a large dis-utility if she receives an item that is neither hers nor belongs to her wish list).

External IDs:doi:10.1007/978-3-032-08560-3_3