A variant on demiurge: A standard way of dividing something into two parts is to have one person divide and the other choose. Alice cuts the slice of cake in half, and Bob takes whichever piece he likes. If Alice is unhappy with her piece, she should have cut the two more evenly. You can apply the same rule to three people by adding an extra step: glide the knife along the edge to create an increasingly large piece, and any of the three can call a stop and take that piece (then divide the rest as for two people). (For a pie, you might make an initial cut at 0-degrees and proceed clockwise, expecting someone to call for the first piece around 120-degrees.) We expect it to lead to a roughly even distribution.
Is this sort of thing (one cuts, the other chooses) a procedure that would inform “fairness” more generally or just a solution to the problem at hand?
A variant on demiurge: A standard way of dividing something into two parts is to have one person divide and the other choose. Alice cuts the slice of cake in half, and Bob takes whichever piece he likes. If Alice is unhappy with her piece, she should have cut the two more evenly. You can apply the same rule to three people by adding an extra step: glide the knife along the edge to create an increasingly large piece, and any of the three can call a stop and take that piece (then divide the rest as for two people). (For a pie, you might make an initial cut at 0-degrees and proceed clockwise, expecting someone to call for the first piece around 120-degrees.) We expect it to lead to a roughly even distribution.
Is this sort of thing (one cuts, the other chooses) a procedure that would inform “fairness” more generally or just a solution to the problem at hand?