Kaj_Sotala comments on Decision Auctions aka "How to fairly assign chores, or decide who gets the last cookie" - Less Wrong

35 [deleted] 21 January 2014 09:13PM

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Comment author: Kaj_Sotala 22 January 2014 05:47:10PM 12 points [-]

I'm curious about how this works with very differing levels of income. My first thought was that that'd break it, since the system ceases to be fair if the absolute upper limit that I can afford to bid on anything is $50 whereas my roommate can easily blow $150 on something in the category of "I don't mind too much, though I do have other things to do now". On the other hand, that would also cause me to very quickly obtain lots of extra money that I couldn't have had otherwise, so that's definitely a bonus. But it still seems like the balance of power would be quite strongly tilted in favor of the wealthier person.

Comment author: dreeves 22 January 2014 07:11:20PM *  11 points [-]

Bethany and I philosophically bite the bullet on this, which is basically to just agree with your second point: the wealthy person gets their way all the time and the poor person gets what's to them a lot of money and everyone is happy.

If that's unpalatable or feels unfair then I think the principled solution is for the wealthy person to simply redress the unfairness with a lump sum payment to redistribute the wealth.

I don't think it's reasonable -- ignoring all the psychology and social intricacies, as I'm wont to do [1] -- to object both to auctions with disparate wealth and to lump sum redistribution to achieve fairness.

Now that I'm introspecting, I suppose it's the case that Bethany and I tend to seize excuses to redistribute wealth, but they have to be plausible ones.

Comment author: kalium 23 January 2014 07:06:52AM *  6 points [-]

You can't accept the money either from an auction or a lump-sum redistribution without losing status, and a roommate relationship is one where you particularly want to maintain similar status levels. If I wanted to be a live-in servant instead of a friend, I could probably find a better deal on Craigslist without sacrificing an existing friendship.

Comment author: ThisSpaceAvailable 23 January 2014 03:39:13AM *  2 points [-]

If you'll excuse the critique of your syntax, it should be "to object both to ... " As it stands, it's a garden path sentence, with the initial parsing being that there are two auctions with disparate wealth, and you don't think it's reasonable to object to both of them.

Also, if an annotation consists of a link, you can put it like this [1]

Comment author: dreeves 01 February 2014 05:37:36AM 0 points [-]

Fixed and fixed. Thank you!

Comment author: ThisSpaceAvailable 23 January 2014 03:02:21AM 9 points [-]

Taking the word "afford" literally, if you can only afford $50 on the first auction, and you lose the auction, then you'll have an extra $50 on the next auction, and will be able to afford $100. If you lose that auction, you'll be able to afford $200 on the auction after that. I think that the concept you're thinking of is not so much afford, as marginal utility cost. For someone with a yearly income of $200,000, a marginal util is going to cost a lot more than for someone with a yearly income of $40,000. Thus, the richer person may be willing to bid more, because the utils are worth more to that person. It is therefore more efficient (that is, it is a Pareto improvement) for the richer person to win the auction, and give money to the poorer person that the poorer person can use to buy utils elsewhere. And I really wonder at who's deciding what goes in the Google Chrome spell checker dictionary, because apparently "util" is in it, but "externality" is not.

Comment author: jkadlubo 22 February 2014 03:24:32PM 0 points [-]

Could you elaborate your interpretation to the extreme, i.e. a classical marriage, with one person earning money and the other caring for home and children?

Comment author: Decius 28 February 2014 12:23:09AM 0 points [-]

One person earns money through work, and the other one stays home and earns money for all of the chores. The stay-at-home partner needs to bid high enough on e.g. childcare to pay half the rent, but not so high that other options become better.

Comment author: Luke_A_Somers 23 January 2014 04:15:39PM 5 points [-]

The balance of power is strongly tilted in favor of the wealthier person to the extent they're willing to throw money at the poorer person. Which is to say, that's as it is normally. With the cash in hand, the cost of chores will rise. It shouldn't be as steeply as ThisSpaceAvailable says, so that the poorer person doesn't get wiped out by the richer doing something once a week, but it will still rise. The poorer person is not an indentured servant any way they choose to play it.

Whether this is conducive to long-term happiness or would warp a friendship I don't know, but I have a hard time seeing it as worse than the rich and poor roommates splitting the chores equally for free.

Comment author: Gunnar_Zarncke 24 January 2014 03:24:23PM 1 point [-]

You can bid time instead of money. And internally we count convert time to money in a fixed rate but only in one direction time->money.

Comment author: kalium 28 January 2014 06:25:39AM -1 points [-]

Time isn't fungible though. 5min cleaning the toilets should count for more than 5min unloading the dishwasher.

Comment author: tut 05 February 2014 07:14:45PM *  0 points [-]

As the poorer person, all the money you get from yootling should go into a budget account which you use only for yootling. That way you are guaranteed both that you won't pay more than you can afford, and that in the long run you will win as much as you lose yootle auctions.