The surplus procedure (SP) is a
fair division
Fair division is the problem in game theory of dividing a set of resources among several people who have an entitlement to them so that each person receives their due share. That problem arises in various real-world settings such as division of inh ...
protocol for dividing goods in a way that achieves proportional
equitability Equitability is a criterion for fair division. A division is called equitable if the subjective value of all partners is the same, i.e., each partner is equally happy with his/her share. Mathematically, that means that for all partners and :
: V_i ...
. It can be generalized to more than 2=two people and is
strategyproof In game theory, an asymmetric game where players have private information is said to be strategy-proof or strategyproof (SP) if it is a weakly-dominant strategy for every player to reveal his/her private information, i.e. given no information about ...
. For three or more people it is not always possible to achieve a division that is both equitable and
envy-free Envy-freeness, also known as no-envy, is a criterion for fair division. It says that, when resources are allocated among people with equal rights, each person should receive a share that is, in their eyes, at least as good as the share received by a ...
.
The surplus procedure was devised by
Steven J. Brams, Michael A. Jones, and Christian Klamler in 2006.
A generalization of the surplus procedure called the equitable procedure (EP) achieves a form of equitability. Equitability and envy-freeness can be incompatible for 3 or more players.
Criticisms of the paper
There have been a few criticisms of aspects of the paper.
Cutting Cakes Correctly
by Theodore P. Hill, School of Mathematics, Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta, GA, 2008 In effect the paper should cite a weaker form of Pareto optimality and suppose the measures are always strictly positive.
See also
* Adjusted winner procedure
Adjusted Winner (AW) is a procedure for envy-free item allocation. Given two agents and some goods, it returns a partition of the goods between the two agents with the following properties:
# Envy-freeness: Each agent believes that his share of th ...
* Approval voting
Approval voting is an electoral system in which voters can select many candidates instead of selecting only one candidate.
Description
Approval voting ballots show a list of the options of candidates running. Approval voting lets each voter i ...
References
Fair division protocols
Welfare economics
{{gametheory-stub