Manipulating picking sequences

Picking sequences are a natural way of allocating indivisible items to agents in a decentralized manner: at each stage, a designated agent chooses an item among those that remain available. We address the computational issues of the manipulation of picking sequences by an agent or a coalition of agents. We show that a single agent can compute an optimal manipulation in polynomial time. Then we consider several notions of coalitional manipulation; for one of these notions, we show that computing an optimal manipulation is easy. We temper these results by giving a nontrivial upper bound on the impact of manipulation on the loss of social welfare.