New Website Offers Provably Fair Solutions To Everyday Problems

An anonymous reader writes Carnegie Mellon researchers have just launched Spliddit, a website that offers methods for helping people split rent, divide goods, and share credit. The novelty is that these methods are all "provably fair": there are mathematical proofs showing that each algorithm on the site provides rigorous fairness guarantees. For example, the method for splitting rent is guaranteed to be envy free: the assignment of rooms and division of rent is such that a housemate would never want to swap places with another housemate. All it takes is a pair of siblings to prove that there's no such thing as "provably fair," non-mathematically.

Comments

sibling fairness

[orgelspieler]

The best example of a fairness algorithm is an old one used with siblings. Tell one kid to divvy up the candy/cake/toys whatever, and let the other kid choose which half they want.

Greece used something similar when trying to get people to honestly report the value of their antiquities. If they listed it for a price the government thought was too low, the agency could buy it for that price. I wish local governments would do something like that with home values. If they want to tax me for a house worth more than what I can get for it on the open market, then I should have the right to sell it to them at that price.

Real problem is emotions

[gurps_npc]

People would never have a problem with dividing things if they didn't get all emotional about it.

Divorce is the prime example - it's rarely about the 2nd home, the dog, the china, etc.

It's about the cheating, the 'stealing the best years of my life', the drug addiction, etc.

Nine times out of ten, people are not really looking for 'fair', they want 'JUSTICE' (in quotes).

A pity, because in reality, 'JUSTICE" is another word for spending all your time and money on lawyers to punish someone else.

If their algorithms won't let you spend all your time and money on punishing your opponent, it won't actually solve all the problems of sub-dividing property.

Here's a great method for splitting chores

[PapayaSF]

We did this back in college, and it worked great.

1. – Make a list of all chores that need to be done every week.
2. – Agree on a point value for each one, with more points for longer or less pleasant chores.
3. – Divide the total points by the number of roommates, so everyone has X points to do per week.

The real genius of the system then comes in: whoever does their chores first gets to pick which ones to do, and whoever puts it off until the end has to do whatever's left. So there's a built-in incentive to do chores early, and no squabbling, because everyone agreed to the point rankings ahead of time.

Re:Toilet etiquette

[tlhIngan]

Can we finally solve the age old question as to whether the seat should be left up or down? This is a function based on how many males vs females there are, and how often a male needs to, er, sit.

In a domestic (i.e., household) setting, the simple compromise is toilet LID down. This way EVERYONE has to lift something to do something. If you're a lady, you lift the lid and the seat is down. If you're man doing #1, then you lift the lid and seat together. for #2, you lift just the lid.

Then when you're done, you put the lid back down. If also keeps the bathroom more hygienic as the act of flushing creates a plume of toilet water. Keeping the lid closed keeps that plume within the toilet and not the entire bathroom.

It has the advantage that stuff doesn't accidentally fall into the toilet too.

Re:Toilet etiquette

[Solandri]

Least-effort solution (minimum number of seat position changes) is for the person who uses the toilet to move it into the configuration they need it in, then leave it.

Least-agony solution (minimum number of gross incidents) is to always lower the seat after use. However, the fact that "men won't follow" this solution is merely coincidence - this solution happens to coincide with the configuration women always use so they can never be guilty of transgressing it. When I was living alone I had a dog who liked to drink out of the toilet. Consequently, I always told guests to lower the lid of the toilet after using it. My female guests always left the lid up. About half the men would lower it (probably due to being scolded about it by women all too often).