ThisSpaceAvailable comments on Decision Auctions aka "How to fairly assign chores, or decide who gets the last cookie" - Less Wrong
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Comments (57)
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.
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.
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]
Fixed and fixed. Thank you!