Fairness and efficiency in cake-cutting with single-peaked preferences

We study the cake-cutting problem where agents have single-peaked preferences over the cake. We show that a recently proposed mechanism by Wang and Wu (2019) to obtain envy-free allocations can yield large welfare losses. Using a simplifying assumption, we characterize all Pareto optimal allocations, which have a simple structure: are peak-preserving and non-wasteful. Finally, we provide simple alternative mechanisms that Pareto dominate that of Wang-Wu and achieve envy-freeness or Pareto optimality. Crown Copyright (c) 2020 Published by Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.