Low-level specific recommendation: Here is a really great calculator for splitting rents for different rooms. You enter in some basic info (total rent, number of rooms), and it continuously adjust room rents and asks individuals what their preferred room would be at different rent splits until it finds a rent split at which everyone would prefer different rooms. You can keep running it a few rounds past that to refine the answer more too.
I used that tool for my current rent split and it worked alright, although I didn’t understand the tool well enough in advance to know that we should do more comparisons than it automatically suggests. As a result, when it proposed a distribution of rents I was in the awkward position of wishing to trade with two of my roommates; preferring their rent-room combinations to mine. The preference was weak enough (I would have paid about ~25$ per month to trade) that I expected to lose value in arguing for further work on this (my roommates were somewhat suspicious of the tool to begin with, so making changes at this stage would have damaged trust). Overall I expect I would have gotten slightly more value from starting with the “gut and negotiate” method. However everyone left this negotiation fairly content and with increased trust, which has reaped fairly good value as well.
In that context I was the coordination pioneer, and it was helpful to leverage the reputation of the nyt when proposing the scheme. I think most people are rightly suspicious of people who propose novel solutions to current coordination problems since there may be a trick to it that leaves them open to abuse; a known reputation (yours or not) is useful for soothing that concern.
Low-level specific recommendation: Here is a really great calculator for splitting rents for different rooms. You enter in some basic info (total rent, number of rooms), and it continuously adjust room rents and asks individuals what their preferred room would be at different rent splits until it finds a rent split at which everyone would prefer different rooms. You can keep running it a few rounds past that to refine the answer more too.
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2014/science/rent-division-calculator.html
I used that tool for my current rent split and it worked alright, although I didn’t understand the tool well enough in advance to know that we should do more comparisons than it automatically suggests. As a result, when it proposed a distribution of rents I was in the awkward position of wishing to trade with two of my roommates; preferring their rent-room combinations to mine. The preference was weak enough (I would have paid about ~25$ per month to trade) that I expected to lose value in arguing for further work on this (my roommates were somewhat suspicious of the tool to begin with, so making changes at this stage would have damaged trust). Overall I expect I would have gotten slightly more value from starting with the “gut and negotiate” method. However everyone left this negotiation fairly content and with increased trust, which has reaped fairly good value as well.
In that context I was the coordination pioneer, and it was helpful to leverage the reputation of the nyt when proposing the scheme. I think most people are rightly suspicious of people who propose novel solutions to current coordination problems since there may be a trick to it that leaves them open to abuse; a known reputation (yours or not) is useful for soothing that concern.