Rainbow Cycle Number and EFX Allocations: (Almost) Closing the Gap

Recently, some studies on the fair allocation of indivisible goods notice a connection between a purely combinatorial problem called the Rainbow Cycle problem and a notion of fairness known as EFX: assuming that the rainbow cycle number for parameter $d$ (i.e. $R(d)$) is $O(d^\beta \log^\gamma d)$, we can find a $(1-\epsilon)$-EFX allocation with $O_{\epsilon}(n^{\frac{\beta}{\beta+1}}\log^{\frac{\gamma}{\beta +1}} n)$ number of discarded goods [7]. The best upper bound on $R(d)$ improved in series of works to $O(d^4)$ [7], $O(d^{2+o(1)})$ [2], and finally to $O(d^2)$ [1]. Also, via a simple observation, we have $R(d) \in \Omega(d)$ [7]. In this paper, we almost close the gap between the upper bound and the lower bound and show that $R(d) \in O(d \log d)$. This in turn proves the existence of $(1-\epsilon)$-EFX allocation with $\widetilde{O}_{\epsilon}(\sqrt n)$ number of discarded goods.