Fair Division: From Cake-Cutting to Dispute Resolution

by Steven J. Brams, Alan D. Taylor

Fair Division, unlike most research on fairness in the social sciences and mathematics, is devoted solely to the analysis of constructive procedures for actually dividing things up and resolving disputes, including indivisible items or issues, such as the marital property in a divorce or sovereignty in an international dispute.

Genres: Economics, Nonfiction

288 pages, Paperback

First published February 23, 1996

Reviews

[Frank · Rating 3 out of 5]

I came to this book immediately after reading Cake-Cutting Algorithms: Be Fair if You Can, mainly because the former gave only the briefest of treatments for allocation of indivisible resources. The two books are about 50% conterminous. One difference is that Be Fair includes many practical examples from political science, law and business. Fair Division: From Cake-Cutting to Dispute Resolution also is polemic; with Brams and Taylor performing hand-waving arguments for adoption their home grown algorithms.

Be Fair belongs on political science bookshelf much more than to mathematics. "Proofs" tend to limp, and I believe I have detected numerous errors. But I wouldn't want to condemn the book or even to dissuade its reading. It covers the spectrum; from cake cutting, to auctions, to elections and split the dollar. Everywhere Be Fair manages to introduce novel and interesting approaches. But anyone who grew up in a culture of mathematical rigour will encounter chapped lips from all the biting. A particularly low point occurs when B&T demonstrate that truth telling is not a dominant strategy of one of their algorithms.They nonetheless insist that the participants might as well state honest preferences anyway, since the optimal strategy is too hard for them to determine.