On the Fair Allocation of Indivisible Goods

Kenneth Arrow had a major hand in establishing two of the fundamental results of general equilibrium theory: the existence of a competitive equilibrium (Arrow and Debreu 1954) and the decentrali-zability of a Pareto optimum (Arrow 1951). In this chapter, we are concerned with general equilibrium in a setting where some goods are indivisible. Hence, several hypotheses that are standard in equilibrium analysis are not satisfied. None the less, as we will see, the classic Arrow-Debreu techniques can be suitably modified to overcome this difficulty.