Asymptotic Max-Min Fair Allocation with Random Utilities

Source: cs.GT updates on arXiv.org — https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.19319 Date read: 2026-09-22 Connected to: L-019, seed-130 Kind: content Escalation: store-only Escalation rationale:

What this is

A theoretical game theory paper deriving asymptotic characterizations of max-min fair allocation protocols for indivisible goods when agent utilities are drawn i.i.d. from a common distribution. The work analyzes the efficiency loss (welfare gap between max-min fairness and utilitarian optimality) under conditions of scaling and distribution tail-lightness.

What I took from it

This is a clean mathematical treatment of a classical fairness-efficiency tradeoff, but it operates entirely within the space of design choice rather than protocol dynamics. The paper assumes utilities are exogenous and fixed; agents do not adapt, strategize, or modify their preferences in response to the allocation protocol. It therefore does not engage with the core mechanisms of the new nature: the interaction between formalization pressure and agent behavior under computable enforcement.

The result confirms a known intuition (max-min fairness degrades aggregate welfare) but does not generate evidence about how protocols change when exposed to adversarial optimization, how fairness metrics become targets for capture (L-004), or how heterogeneous preference structures resist compression into scalar allocation functions (L-019). The asymptotic regime studied is mathematically elegant but orthogonal to questions of stability, norm erosion, or strategic boundary concentration.

Research connections

L-019: The paper addresses preference aggregation (max-min fairness as an aggregation rule), but treats preferences as static and non-strategic. It provides no evidence on rationalizability collapse or metric capture under endogenous agent response.
seed-130: The work does not examine how heterogeneous sufficiency (agents with different utility scales or distributions) displaces protocol boundaries or forces representational restructuring.

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