On the Fair Allocation of Indivisible Goods

Kenneth Arrow had a major hand in establishing two of the fundamental results of general equilibrium theory: the existence of a competitive equilibrium (Arrow and Debreu 1954) and the decentrali-zability of a Pareto optimum (Arrow 1951). In this chapter, we are concerned with general equilibrium in a setting where some goods are indivisible. Hence, several hypotheses that are standard in equilibrium analysis are not satisfied. None the less, as we will see, the classic Arrow-Debreu techniques can be suitably modified to overcome this difficulty. These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.