Yea but the prices there are arbitrary. With the NYT calculator if you make "rational" choices you are guaranteed at least a fair split (better if your mate is irrational)
Jon from Splitwise here, thanks @mjmahone17 for mentioning our answer to this problem.
I think if you have complex or specific preferences about rent splitting (ie I don't want to live next to the kitchen) and live with a bunch of fellow nerds, an implicit fair division system may work well. The NYT calc is a great new implementation the Francis Su paper - the old Java one was broken.
If you have non-nerd roommates, couples living together, or are already assigned to rooms by fate or immutable preference, that's what the Splitwise calculator is for. The price are based on square-footage, survey data, and common sense. Not everyone is willing to change from the room they like, or sit for an auction.
Good point, for cases where you can't actually make a choice a curated price calculator is the best one can really hope for. In any case splitwise is a nice product btw :)
Which is kind of insane, right? The whole point of the bidding system is that it ends in an optimal position, where nobody would pay more for a room than someone else is already paying. Whereas with an arbitrary system, you might well end up in that situation.
I suppose the insight is that (some or many) people are more ready to accept an unfair situation dictated by a dispassionate external authority (even if that authority is just some JavaScript!) than a fair situation reached by negotiation.
Part of what might make this reasonable is that this process takes who is moving in together as a given. Say you and I want to be roommates, and you happen to know that I have a pathological fear of sleeping in big bedrooms. Clearly the efficient thing to happen if you're a normal person is for you to get the large room and me to get the small room. But how much do we pay?
It seems rather unfair of you to incorporate that information into the bidding system and bid up the price of the small room (a sort of strategic bidding). But it also seems unfair that if we both answer honestly the system has a good chance of making the smaller room priced the same (or more than) the big room.
With any other roommate, especially one who didn't know about my pathological fear, I could expect to pay less for the smaller room. These "external authorities" might reflect such widespread notions, as well as avoid the risk of strategic bidding that can occur after roommate selection is fixed.
