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15 - Example: Dividing A Few Items II

Erich Prisner
Affiliation:
Franklin University Switzerland
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Summary

A glimpse into statistics, mechanism design, and incomplete information

Prerequisites: Chapters 1, 8, 12, and 9.

You have two lovely daughters, Ann and Beth. A friend gave you a few presents for them. You don't know how much the presents mean to your daughters, but you want to be fair, and you want them to be as happy as possible. How would you distribute them?

We don't have a game yet, only the description of a problem.

The most important assumption, used in Section 15.4, is that the daughters are so close to each other that they can estimate the value of each item to their sister. The more complicated incomplete information situation where this is not the case is briefly discussed in Section 15.5.

You could distribute the items yourself. Since you don't know about the values of the items to your daughters, it may seem fairest to give about the same number of items to each. However, the outcome is not fair if one daughter is much happier with your choice than the other. Another disadvantage of the method is that it is not efficient—the items are distributed without considering their values to Ann and Beth. Since you don't know these values, but Ann and Beth do, they should be involved in the distribution process. This will make it more likely that they get items that are valuable to them.

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Publisher: Mathematical Association of America
Print publication year: 2014

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