Wednesday, November 25, 2009

Location for Group Meeting: Efficient, Equitable and Envy Free


Last night my group was negotiating a meeting place to work on our SDA final project, which was mostly dependant on how long everybody's drive times would be. I will be driving from my in-laws in Woodstock, Ryan from Smyrna, Doug from Marietta, and Dave from all the way out in John's creek. Our options for meeting location were infinite, but we whittled them down to the two locations that had the facilities we needed: my work in Kennesaw, and Emory. The payouts for each player are shown below, measured in minutes of driving distance.


Kennesaw results the shortest drive for Ryan, Doug, and myself. However, this makes Dave's drive longer than his drive to Decatur. For Dave in this case, Kennesaw is an inequitable solution and he is full of envy of our short drive times. However, Kennesaw results in the least overall driving time for the overall group (95 minutes vs 190 minutes to Decatur). At this point, I realized, this is an opportunity for cash (or other) side payments. A potential efficient, equitable, and envy free solution: we meet in Kennesaw and the group buys Dave a 12-pack of beer (depending on how Dave values his time ... and beer).

No comments:

Post a Comment