Project Details

The idea for this website came after digesting the article Impartial division of a dollar by Geoffroy De Clippel, Herve Moulin and Nicolaus Tideman (JET 2008). Herve Moulin was my PhD examiner so I have followed his work for a number of years and always enjoyed it. The mechanism presented in that article I found particularly ingenious and I have started to use it to split marks of group projects in my courses, and several colleagues have started using it too. Sven Seuken (special thanks to him!) and myself adapted it for a blockchain start-up company too (the mechanism working better than the blockchain technology). There is a second (less mathy) paper by Nicolaus Tideman and Florenz Plassmann on the same mechanism which presents some more details.

In sum, the said mechanism proposes a way to split gains of a joint project on the basis of peer-review, with the key feature that one does not express how much one thinks one did oneself, and that one’s own review of the others does not change how much one gets. Instead, one reviews the other group members’ performances in terms of percentages toward doing “the rest” (i.e. what one did not do).

In my experience, using this mechanism has led to:

• better group projects
• due to reduced free-riding
• due to better communication within teams because team members want others to appreciate their contributions
• less hassle for the professor/manager/teacher trying to “look into the process” of who did what
• fairer marks overall (I think)

Actually, those teams that end up splitting fairly equally tend to be the best overall. See some first attempts at organizing these findings in a game-theoretic framework here.

Thanks go to expansesoft for the development and to a «Critical Thinking» award from ETH Zurich that allowed building this. I was also inspired by spliddit’s demo tool which was developed jointly with some of the authors of de Clippel et al. Their website offers some other fun mechanisms too.

Please go and use DVSN.app (which BTW stands for DiViSioN application) for your purposes including:

• giving individual grades for group project
• splitting gains of a collaboration
• allocating credit
• sharing a group bonus

Login infos, emails, etc. shall not be used, shared, or sold. Thanks for your interest -- comments and suggestions are of course welcome!