Research map / Multi-agent systems and games / Games and equilibria
Fair division and coalition formation
Analyzes complexity and fairness of allocating indivisible goods and forming coalitions.
99 accepted papers at ICML, NeurIPS, ICLR, CVPR and AAAI (2016–2026) · an approach in Games and equilibria, keyword cluster “principal · strategic · welfare”
State History Tried Preprints Who Export
Where it stands
Not enough benchmark data Fewer than four papers report the same benchmark, so there is no record to follow.
21 papers in 2023–24 and 21 in 2025–26 (at ICML, NeurIPS, ICLR, CVPR and AAAI); its share of the topic shrank, from 16.5% to 14.7%.
How this is decided
A benchmark is tracked when at least four papers of this approach report their own method on the same dataset and metric in at least two different years. Its record is the best number reported up to 2024 compared with the best reported in 2025–26: still improving means at least 1% better, flat means at most 0.2% better with at least two papers from 2025–26 trying. Numbers on a different scale from the rest (a fraction among percentages) and far outliers are left out. Results come from different papers with different setups, so they are signals, not head-to-head comparisons. The share of papers is counted at ICML, NeurIPS, ICLR, CVPR and AAAI.
How it got here
Most cited paper of each year
- 2016 · False-Name-Proof Locations of Two Facilities: Economic and Algorithmic Approaches (AAAI 2016 · 18 citations)
- 2017 · Group Activity Selection on Social Networks (AAAI 2017 · 30 citations)
- 2018 · Facility Location Games With Fractional Preferences (AAAI 2018 · 50 citations)
- 2019 · “Reverse Gerrymandering”: Manipulation in Multi-Group Decision Making (AAAI 2019 · 8 citations)
- 2020 · Subsidy Allocations in the Presence of Income Shocks (AAAI 2020 · 12 citations)
- 2021 · A Few Queries Go a Long Way: Information-Distortion Tradeoffs in Matching (AAAI 2021 · 21 citations)
- 2022 · Almost Full EFX Exists for Four Agents (AAAI 2022 · 40 citations)
- 2023 · Finding Fair Allocations under Budget Constraints (AAAI 2023 · 14 citations)
- 2024 · Stability in Online Coalition Formation (AAAI 2024 · 4 citations)
- 2025 · Balanced and Fair Partitioning of Friends (AAAI 2025 · 2 citations)
- 2026 · On the Coordination of Value-Maximizing Bidders (ICML 2026 · 0 citations)
Earliest papers here
- False-Name-Proof Locations of Two Facilities: Economic and Algorithmic Approaches (AAAI 2016 · 18 citations)
- Autonomous Electricity Trading Using Time-of-Use Tariffs in a Competitive Market (AAAI 2016 · 17 citations)
- Quantitative Extensions of the Condorcet Jury Theorem with Strategic Agents (AAAI 2016 · 2 citations)
What has been tried
70 papers here report 513 measured changes (a component added, removed or swapped, compared with a baseline): helped 59%, no clear effect 5%, hurt 32%, mixed 4%. Papers mostly publish changes that helped, so "helped" is over-represented.
Ablations in recent papers
| What was changed | Measured on | Result | Effect | Paper |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Relax payoff concavity while retaining the other sufficient condition | Core-stable data exchange existence · existence | Hurt | On the Existence and Complexity of Core-Stable Data Exchanges (NeurIPS 2025 · 0 citations) |
Recent preprints
Loading recent arXiv preprints…
Who publishes on it
Institutions on the most papers of this approach since 2023 (of 42 papers; from OpenAlex and the papers' affiliations).
- University of Oxford · 3 papers
- Bar-Ilan University · 2 papers
- National University of Singapore · 2 papers
- University of New South Wales · 2 papers
- Aarhus University · 2 papers
- Technical University of Munich · 2 papers
- University of Nebraska-Lincoln · 2 papers
- City University of Hong Kong · 2 papers
- University of Calabria · 2 papers
- Czech Technical University in Prague · 2 papers
Use it
Download BibTeX of 40 key papersOpen the topic in the interactive map
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Related approaches
Same keyword cluster
- Learning with strategic agents (74 papers)
- Strategic classification (51 papers)
Elsewhere in the topic
- Learning in Markov games (111 papers)
- Cooperation and social dilemmas (95 papers)
- Opponent modeling in competitive games (75 papers)
- Mean-field game learning (21 papers)
Benchmark numbers, ablations and baseline numbers are extracted by AI from each paper's full text and can be wrong; the paper is the authority. Data: results index of 2026-11-02, citation counts from OpenAlex (2026-10-09).