Fair division of indivisible items among people with similar preferences

We study divisions of a set of indivisible items among three or more people who have the same strict preferences on items but can have different prefe rences on subsets of items. Preferences on subsets are assumed representabl e by additive utilities. Each item is received by exactly one person and no payments are involved. The paper focuses on envy-freeness within a divisio n and Pareto optimality among divisions. We characterize envy-free division s through a notion of convex dominance and observe that a situation can hav e envy-free divisions none of which is Pareto-optimal. (C) 2001 Elsevier Sc ience B.V. All rights reserved.