Student Talk Series: Karl Voss, 9/1 @ noon in Olin 268

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Title:  Being fair in a world of limited resources

Abstract:  Fair division is a problem that all of us encounter regularly.  Every time you and another person or several people have to divide something – pizza, money, space, Neapolitan ice cream, band width, candy, etc. – you are working on a fair-division problem.  How can several people share a limited resource and make sure that no person feels the resulting allocation is unfair?   Before we can answer this question, we need to figure out what exactly is means to be ‘fair’.  The mathematical development of this subject is fairly recent and the results touch issues in economics and game theory. We will do lots of examples.