20 - Is it fair that my neighbor's iPad downloads faster?

Summary

We have come to the last chapter, on a sensitive subject that we touched upon many times in the previous chapters and forms an essential part of both social choice theory and technology network design: quantifying fairness of resource allocation. This may sound obvious, but it does not hurt to highlight: the scope of our discussion will be only on performance metrics, not on liberty and rights.

A Short Answer

Thinking about fairness

The naive view of “equality is fairness” is problematic in examining performance metrics of a group of users stemming from some allocation of resources. If you have to choose from an allocation of (1, 1) Mbps between two iPad users, and an allocation of (100, 101) Mbps, many people would choose (100, 101) Mbps even though it deviates from an equal allocation. Magnitude matters. Part of Rawls' theory of justice is the difference principle that we will discuss in the Advanced Material, which prefers a less equal allocation if that means everyone gets more. Of course, a more challenging choice would have been between (1, 1) Mbps and (1, 2) Mbps.

Another objection to marking equal allocations as the most fair stems from the differences in the contributions by, and the needs of, different users. If a user in a social network glues the entire network together, her contribution is higher than that of a “leaf node” user. If one works twice as hard or twice as effectively as another, these two people should not receive identical salaries.