I don’t actually think ‘Alice gets half the money’ is the fair allocation in your example.
Imagine Alice and Bob splitting a pile of 100 tokens, which either of them can exchange for $10M each. It seems obvious that the fair split here involves each of them ending up with $500M.
To say that the fair split in your example is for each player to end up with $500M is to place literally zero value on ‘token-exchange rate’, which seems unlikely to be the right resolution.
The background details I’d been imagining are that Alive and Bob were in essentially identical situations before their interaction, and it was just luck that Alice and Bob got the capabilities they did.
Alice and Bob have two ways to convert tokens into money, and I’d claim that any rational joint strategy involves only using Bob’s way. Alice’s ability to convert tokens into pennies is a red herring that any rational group should ignore.
At that point, it’s just a bargaining game over how to split the $1,000,000,000. And I claim that game is symmetric, since they’re both equally necessary for that surplus to come into existence.
If Bob had instead paid huge costs to create the ability to turn tokens into tens of millions of dollars, I totally think his costs should be repaid before splitting the remaining surplus fairly.
I don’t actually think ‘Alice gets half the money’ is the fair allocation in your example.
Imagine Alice and Bob splitting a pile of 100 tokens, which either of them can exchange for $10M each. It seems obvious that the fair split here involves each of them ending up with $500M.
To say that the fair split in your example is for each player to end up with $500M is to place literally zero value on ‘token-exchange rate’, which seems unlikely to be the right resolution.
This might be a framing thing!
The background details I’d been imagining are that Alive and Bob were in essentially identical situations before their interaction, and it was just luck that Alice and Bob got the capabilities they did.
Alice and Bob have two ways to convert tokens into money, and I’d claim that any rational joint strategy involves only using Bob’s way. Alice’s ability to convert tokens into pennies is a red herring that any rational group should ignore.
At that point, it’s just a bargaining game over how to split the $1,000,000,000. And I claim that game is symmetric, since they’re both equally necessary for that surplus to come into existence.
If Bob had instead paid huge costs to create the ability to turn tokens into tens of millions of dollars, I totally think his costs should be repaid before splitting the remaining surplus fairly.