Schlagwort: Technologie

IT's magic.

  • 2013-10-19

Our approach in this paper is not only constructive, but we consider it to be procedural as well. In the context of fair division, we view a procedure as featuring the following characteristics: it is intuitive, meaning that each step must be easy to understand; it is plausible, meaning that each step must be simple to argue; and it is manageable, meaning that each step must be straightforward to compute. We see these subjective criteria as relevant for the practical implementation of a fair-division outcome, in particular when parties in real life prefer to establish fairness by themselves, rather than trust the ‘‘magic’’ of a computer algorithm.

Claus-Jochen Haake, Matthias G. Raith, and Francis Edward Su. Bidding for envy-freeness: a procedural approach to n-player fair-division problems.
In: Social Choice and Welfare, 19(4):723–749, 2002.

Slave State.

  • 2013-10-05

Let us take an illustration. Suppose that, at a given moment, a certain number of people are engaged in the manufacture of pins. They make as many pins as the world needs, working (say) eight hours a day. Someone makes an invention by which the same number of men can make twice as many pins: pins are already so cheap that hardly any more will be bought at a lower price. In a sensible world, everybody concerned in the manufacturing of pins would take to working four hours instead of eight, and everything else would go on as before. But in the actual world this would be thought demoralizing. The men still work eight hours, there are too many pins, some employers go bankrupt, and half the men previously concerned in making pins are thrown out of work. There is, in the end, just as much leisure as on the other plan, but half the men are totally idle while half are still overworked. In this way, it is insured that the unavoidable leisure shall cause misery all round instead of being a universal source of happiness. Can anything more insane be imagined?

Bertie