Communications of the ACM
Carnegie Mellon Project Divides Everyday Tasks, Expenses In Ways Scientifically Calculated to Make Everyone Happy
Researchers at Carnegie Mellon University have developed a website that will leverage decades of academic research to divide things equitably, without resentment.
Credit: Carnegie Mellon News (PA)
Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) researchers have developed Spliddit.org, a free, not-for-profit website that leverages decades of academic research on how to divide things equitably without resentment.
The website provides several different services, including dividing rents, sharing credit on work, splitting inheritances, sharing chores, and fairly dividing cab fares. The cab fare service is based on the concept of the Shapely value, which considers the marginal contributions of each person in an endeavor, in this case the distance to each person's address and their proximity to each other.
"This is a concept that has been around since 1953 and, though it has been studied in thousands of research papers, this is the first time to my knowledge that it has ever been implemented in a publicly available service," says CMU professor Ariel Procaccia.
Spliddit recently launched a new task distribution service that asks members of a group to identify their preferences for certain tasks and to quantify that preference. The site then allocates tasks as fairly as possible.
Spliddit, which launched in November 2014, has already had almost 40,000 unique users.
From Carnegie Mellon News (PA)
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