Simultaneous eating algorithm and greedy algorithm in assignment problems

Abstract

The simultaneous eating algorithm (SEA) and probabilistic serial (PS) mechanism are well known for allocating a set of divisible or indivisible goods to agents with ordinal preferences. The PS mechanism is SEA at the same eating speed. The prominent property of SEA is ordinal efficiency. Recently, we extended the PS mechanism (EPS) from a fixed quota of each good to a variable varying in a polytope constrained by submodular functions. In this article, we further generalized some results on SEA. After formalizing the extended ESA (ESEA), we show that it can be characterized by ordinal efficiency. We established a stronger summation optimization than the Pareto type of ordinal efficiency by an introduced weight vector. The weights in the summation optimization coincide with agents’ preferences at the acyclic positive values of an allocation. Hence, the order of goods selected to eat in ESEA is exactly the one chosen in the execution of the well-known greedy algorithm.