We consider the problem of allocating heterogeneous and indivisible goods among strategic agents, with preferences over subsets of goods, when there is no medium of exchange. This model captures the well studied problem of fair allocation of indivisible goods. Serial-quota mechanisms are allocation mechanisms where there is a predefined order over agents, and each agent in her turn picks a predefined number of goods from the remaining goods. These mechanisms are clearly strategy-proof, non-bossy, and neutral. Are there other mechanisms with these properties? We show that for important classes of strict ordinal preferences (as lexicographic preferences, and as the class of all strict preferences), these are the only mechanisms with these properties. Importantly, unlike previous work, we can prove the claim even for mechanisms that are not Pareto-efficient. Moreover, we generalize these results to preferences that are cardinal, including any valuation class that contains additive valuations. We then derive strong negative implications of this result on truthful mechanisms for fair allocation of indivisible goods to agents with additive valuations.

翻译：本文研究在不存在交换媒介的情况下，在具有物品子集偏好的策略型智能体之间分配异质且不可分割物品的问题。该模型涵盖了不可分割物品公平分配这一被广泛研究的经典问题。序列配额机制是一种预先设定智能体顺序的分配机制，每个智能体按序从剩余物品中选取预定数量的物品。这类机制显然具有策略证明性、非支配性和中立性。是否还存在其他具备这些性质的机制？我们证明，对于严格序数偏好的重要类别（如词典序偏好及所有严格偏好类别），序列配额机制是唯一满足这些性质的机制。重要的是，与先前研究不同，我们的证明甚至适用于非帕累托效率的机制。此外，我们将这些结果推广到基数偏好情形，涵盖包含可加估值在内的任意估值类别。基于此，我们进一步推导出该结论对具有可加估值的智能体进行不可分割物品公平分配的真实机制所产生的强烈负面含义。