When Maximum Nash Welfare Becomes Strongly Fair: Bi-valued Goods

Abstract

For the fair allocation of indivisible goods, the milestone work of Caragiannis et al. (2019) revolutionized the understanding of Maximum Nash Welfare (MNW) allocations by revealing their"unreasonable"ability to balance fairness (EF1) and efficiency (PO) for general additive functions. Subsequent work established that MNW allocations simultaneously satisfy EFX and GMMS (and consequently MMS and PMMS) for binary instances (Amanatidis et al. 2021 and Barman et al. 2018), and satisfy EFX for bi-valued instances (Amanatidis et al. 2021). In this paper, we revisit the (personalized) bi-valued instances and provide a tight characterization of the approximation guarantees of MNW allocations with respect to EFX, PMMS, and GMMS, showing that these guarantees are significantly stronger than what is known for general valuations. Furthermore, we demonstrate that even for the slightly more general setting of tri-valued instances, the fairness guarantees of MNW deteriorate significantly, which establishes a sharp boundary on the instances for which MNW allocations are strongly fair.