AMMCS-2013 Semi-Plenary Talk

Title: Fair Division

Steven Brams

Abstract: Over the past 20 years, there has been burgeoning interest in the subject of fair division --- how one divides a single divisible good (e.g., a cake), or multiple indivisible goods (e.g., the marital property in a divorce), to satisfy such properties as efficiency, envy-freeness, and equitability. Some of the major possibility and impossibility results -- relating to both the existence of such a division and algorithms for producing it -- will be reviewed. How these results apply to dividing land, allocating items in a family estate to heirs, determining which rooms housemates get and how much of the rent each pays for its room, and matching applicants to colleges will be among the applications discussed.

Steven J. Brams is Professor of Politics at New York University and the author, co-author, or co-editor of 18 books and more than 250 articles. His books include Theory of Moves (Cambridge, 1994) and, co-authored with Alan D. Taylor, Fair Division: From Cake-Cutting to Dispute Resolution (Cambridge, 1996) and The Win-Win Solution: Guaranteeing Fair Shares to Everybody (Norton, 1999). His newest books are Mathematics and Democracy: Designing Better Voting and Fair-Division Procedures (Princeton, 2008) and Game Theory and the Humanities: Bridging Two Worlds (MIT, 2011). He holds two patents for fair-division algorithms and is chairman of the advisory board of Fair Outcomes, Inc.

Brams has applied game theory and social-choice theory to voting and elections, bargaining and fairness, international relations, and the Bible, theology, and literature. He is a former president of the Peace Science Society (1990-91) and of the Public Choice Society (2004-2006). He is a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (1986), a Guggenheim Fellow (1986-87), and was a Visiting Scholar at the Russell Sage Foundation (1998-99).