# Stochastic, Nerdtastic Restaurant Bill Splitting

Tuesday, July 17, 2012
By dreeves

We have worked out what we believe is the fastest fair way to split a restaurant bill! You know what the state of the art is like so this is quite a breakthrough. To be clear about the “fastest fair way” it helps to compare to the extremes. First, the slowest fair way to split a bill is to compute exactly what everyone ordered. Groan. Dividing the bill equally avoids the hassle of figuring out who got what but is still pretty annoying, making change and whatnot. And of course that’s unfair to the people who ordered less, not to mention that it distorts what people order.

If you’re not a stickler for fairness and social efficiency, the hands-down fastest solution is credit card roulette: put everyone’s credit card in a hat and pick one. That person pays the whole bill. If everyone happened to have spent the same amount, then credit card roulette is also perfectly fair. [1]

The question, then, is how to get as close as possible to the convenience of credit card roulette but with perfect fairness: everyone pays, in expectation, exactly what they owe. Fortunately, and perhaps surprisingly, we don’t need to figure out who ordered what — for the most part — in order to achieve this.

Here’s what you do! Start with any item on the bill. The person who ordered that item pays the bill with probability equal to the cost of that item divided by the subtotal. Flip the appropriately biased coin [2]; if that person is it, then you’re done. If not, then subtract that item from the subtotal and repeat, recursively, with another arbitrary item. If you start with expensive items then you’ll probably find the person who’s paying after a handful of items, but it doesn’t matter for fairness what order you pick things in. You won’t have to figure out all the confusing drinks and appetizers (yet the outcome is as fair as if you had!).

## Expectorant

David Pennock is the one who first thought of this algorithm. We’ll leave it as an exercise for the reader to prove that it works. Proving that it’s the fastest fair algorithm should also be straightforward, once you pin down what “fastest” means. But enough theory. Bethany Soule and I wrote a little Android app that makes this algorithm quite convenient. We call it Expectorant (“exquisite fairness in expectation”). Here’s an example of how it implements the above procedure:

Say the subtotal is $100 and the items on the bill are$5, $25,$60, and $10. Enter 100:5 and have the person who ordered the$5 item pick a number from 1 to 20. If their number is lit up (a 5% chance) they get to pay the whole bill! If not, amend the expression as 100:5,25 and repeat for the person who got the $25 item. They’ll “win” with probability 25/(100-5). If they’re off the hook, amend again to 100:5,25,60. This time most likely — p = 60/(100-5-25) — the$60 person will win the honor of paying the bill. If not, notice that 100:5,25,60,10 yields 10/(100-5-25-60) = 1. So if the process makes it to the last item on the bill then whoever got that item is it. Mathemagically, it doesn’t matter what order you put the items in — each person “wins” (pays the whole bill) with probability equal to their own fair share of the bill. In other words, you pay in expectation exactly your fair share. Including tax and tip, even though we never entered those. Pretty slick! Speaking of tips, remember you can minimize the hassle by starting with the most expensive items. Then you don’t have to figure out who most of the items belong to. Oh, and if 3 people split the $10 pickled monkey balls just treat it as 3 items,$10/3 each (expressions instead of numbers are allowed).

## I bet I can game this by…

You really can’t! It doesn’t matter if you get two cheap appetizers instead of one entree or if you arrange to go first or last. Your probability of paying will be the sum of the costs of your dishes divided by the subtotal. That’s true even if none of your dishes were ever identified on the bill as yours. Another common question about this algorithm is what happens if no one gets chosen. The answer is that that can’t happen. If the process makes it to the last item on the bill then whoever got that item is it. But it rarely gets to the last item, which is the beauty of it. On average you’ll only traverse half the bill — and that’s half in terms of dollar value, not number of items. So much less than half the items if most of the bill is concentrated in a few expensive entrees.

We’ve even added some handy syntactic sugar to generalize the case of needing to pay someone with one of two amounts, one of which is too small and one which is too big. Entering something like 7@5,20 is a shortcut for (7-5)/(20-5). That’s the probability p such that (1-p)⋅5 + p⋅20 = 7. WTF? Here’s TF: If you have a five and a twenty and owe me $7, then give me the twenty with that probability and the five otherwise. Exquisitely fair (in expectation)! ## Addendum: A Faster Fair Method! There’s been a lively discussion of Expectorant on Hacker News since this went to press. The best comment was by Michael Donaghy who pointed out a faster version of the mechanism: Pick a uniform random number between 0 and the subtotal and walk down the bill adding up the costs (oblivious to who ordered what) until you hit the item that pushes you over the chosen number. Whoever ordered that item pays. One complication: if that item is something that occurs more than once on the bill then you need a way to disambiguate. You could randomize again or you could use a pre-decided ordering of the diners. Either way, you have to make sure to identify all the people who ordered that item. That’s perhaps a disadvantage compared to our version of Expectorant where items are always considered one at a time in isolation. But other than that, this version is certainly faster, and just as fair. ## Related reading ## Footnotes [1] A common complaint about stochastic schemes is that they’re “only fair if you do it repeatedly with the same group of people”. That’s true if you insist on ex post fairness. We’re usually happy with ex ante fairness. Consider selling me a (perfectly fairly priced) lottery ticket for a dollar. That’s guaranteed to be unfair, ex post. Either you sold me a worthless piece of paper for a dollar, or I got a million dollars and only paid a dollar for it. But the fact that none of us knew which would happen made the one dollar price fair. Same story with venture capital investment, for example. You may need a gambling mentality to be down with it, but it’s quite fair even if only done once. The fact that it averages out in the long term to be perfectly fair ex post is icing on the cake. [2] Here’s a way two people can flip a biased coin using nothing but their brains. It’s even quite robust to the notorious inability of humans to generate plausible random numbers. Person one writes down a fraction p of the numbers from 1 to 20. Person two guesses a number from 1 to 20. If their guess was one of the written down numbers, call the biased coin flip heads. We haven’t tested this rigorously but our sense from doing this a lot amongst ourselves is that the two people’s lack of randomness pretty much cancels out, particularly if they’re trying for opposite outcomes, and yields reasonably random Bernoulli outcomes. Of course with numbers 1 to 20 you’re limited to a granularity of 5% on the probabilities. You could use, say, 1 to 100 but that’s a bit unwieldy. [3] There’s a very small way in which you do have to trust Expectorant: If the probability percentage is not a multiple of 5. For example, to get a 1% probability you’d need to light up a fifth of one of the numbers (1-20). That’s not allowed so Expectorant lights up one number with 1/5 probability. It always does this fairly for probabilities that don’t work out to an integer number of numbers lit up. In theory it could cheat and round in the wrong direction. But it doesn’t, so you’re actually getting probabilities to many decimal places of fairness, despite the discrete grid. Illustration: Kelly Savage The ingenious restaurant bill splitting algorithm was devised by Dave Pennock of, appropriately, oddhead.com. Thanks to Sharad Goel and Kelly Savage for expectorizing the bill with us every time we go out to dinner. Tags: , , , , , • A-hole Not only will you never get laid if you do this, you will also lose the respect of all your friends. Sometimes a little generosity goes a long way. • sdafaesyr Why not let everyone pay for what they had? That’s fair. • http://www.facebook.com/murbard Arthur Breitman There’s a way to use Expectorant that allow people to reduce risk. The technique is to post collateral. Let’s say the algorithm is currently looking at a$17 steak-frites I ordered. Since I am risk averse, I decide to put $15 in cash in the center of the table. Thus, (17-15) is entered in expectorant. At the end, the person who has to pay for everyone gets the cash at the center of the table. Doing this individually reduces risk but does not reduce the worst case scenario. However, if many people do it, it reduces risk for everyone *and* reduces the worst case scenario. A problem related to expectorant is to estimate the average number of steps the procedure takes. It depends on the number of items on the bill and on the distribution of prices. Assuming an exponential distribution, the asymptotic number of step is ~ n/4. It’s different for other distributions, don’t have a proof. Open questions, – Is there a general theorem that can relate this to a simple metric about the distribution (kurtosis for instance) – Empirically, what does the distribution of item prices on a restaurant bill look like anyway? • http://beeminder.com Daniel Reeves The cash on the table variant is brilliant! In the past I’ve offered insurance for people who were squeamish about it (pay me what you think you owe and I’ll step in for you and pay the whole bill if you’re chosen). For people who really don’t want any chance of paying the whole bill you still have hassles with exact change. Though you could use the method in “Bonus Expectorizing” for that. EDIT: Wait, this isn’t quite right! If my$17 item comes up and I put $17 on the table then I have zero chance of paying the whole bill but I’ve only paid my subtotal, not tax and tip. • http://www.facebook.com/murbard Arthur Breitman Argh, didn’t think of the tax & tip problem. A solution would be to make the app tax & tip aware. It’s a bit less elegant but it works. • David Pennock Great writeup, Dan. It’s natural to expectorate, especially after a big meal. Thanks for the attribution: much appreciated. Is “to expectorant” also a verb? Expectoranate? Now we just need someone to create an app where you can take a picture of the bill, point to the subtotal, then point one at a time to the items and have it OCR the prices and automatically expectorant. What do you do when two people order the identical item? I guess you have to identify who is “up” before expectoranting. (Actually, never mind, with expectorant the purchaser of the item must be identified so they can pick a number from 1-20.) • http://beeminder.com Daniel Reeves “Expectorize” is how we’ve been verbing it. :) That’s right for identical items. There’s no advantage to going sooner or later so just take a volunteer. If you get to a shared appetizer you can pick one of the people and enter the amount as$x/n where x is the amount and n the number of people who shared it.

• Carlos Bueno

When I was a traveling consultant we had a similar method based on the assumption that the same people would eat together often and have to split the bill.

1) Everyone pulls out a dollar bill. Or fiver, or whatever. Doesn’t matter.

2) The person who paid last randomly exchanges bills with someone else.

3) That person randomly exchanges, etc, until everyone has had a shot to change or pass.

4) Compare the last three digits of the serial numbers. The person with the lowest number pays.

• http://beeminder.com Daniel Reeves

Ah, cool. Fundamentally this is another way to implement standard credit card roulette. Quite cleverly.

Just now I added an addendum to the post with a new variant that involves picking a random number between 0 and the subtotal. You could probably work out an elegant way to use serial numbers on bills to do such a randomization.

• http://beeminder.com Daniel Reeves

Yeah, if you can decide that tax+tip is, say, 25% then when the person puts the $15 on the table, you enter “17-15/1.25” as their number for expectorant. Not so bad. Then if you actually put down$17 + 25% = \$21.25 in cash then what you type into expectorant is 17-21.25/1.25 which is zero, as it should be. That person covered their item and has no risk of paying the whole bill.

• Zed

The notion is that it’s much slower (or more boring). However, I suspect that though the algorithmic complexity may be worse, it parallelizes a lot better than having one chump tap away at his phone.

• David Pennock

I love Arthur’s “post collateral” addition. Brilliant indeed.
I love the HN debate.
I like lmm’s faster method but I think it has a few more drawbacks than Daniel identified:
* It requires a trusted random number generator. Expectorant does not since the person picks a number from 1-20.
* Unless you always scan from top to bottom (which is inefficient) or always scan *exactly* in descending price order (which requires a mental sort) it’s easier to game. Whoever is picking items can “accidentally” skip their own item if they are near the threshold.
* If you scan in descending price order, you have to group items by equal price, not just by identical items. In other words, if there are two coffees and a tea, all the same price, then you have to treat them as a group of 3 and use your predefined method of ordering the 3 people. You can’t treat the coffees as a group of 2, then the tea, otherwise gaming could be going on. (Or you need a predefined sort on items too, like coffee before tea (alphabetical), but this gets kind of ridiculous in terms of number of tie breaking rules.
Still, it’s definitely worth trying “in the field” to see if it works well/better.

• http://beeminder.com Daniel Reeves

Check out Carlos Bueno’s comment here from 2 days ago, with a variant of credit card roulette using serial numbers on dollar bills. I think that would work nicely for lmm’s spinner method. Put a decimal point in front of the serial number — or better, at the end of the serial number and read it backwards — on a randomly chosen dollar bill and multiply that by the subtotal.

I’m also eager to try this in the field! Maybe best to avoid the mental sort and go strictly by the order on the bill. Then when you identify the Dish of Doom you have to make sure to identify any other Dish of Doom Duplicates. Let’s say we order people clockwise starting on the gamemaster’s left. Then we can assign the Dish of Doom to the right person among those who ordered Dish of Doom Duplicates.

• David Pennock

‘dish of doom’ — love it.

Are bill serial numbers uniform?

I guess if you add the time required to explain the procedure (and the validity of it) you’d be much faster just calculating the exact split…

• http://beeminder.com Daniel Reeves

Good question. Benford’s Law — http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benford's_law — might be at play. I bet that reversing the serial number would suffice though.

• http://beeminder.com Daniel Reeves

Doh! I just proposed this when out to eat with my sister and brother-in-law and they pointed out that this totally doesn’t work! (We did the normal version of Expectorant and they liked it. :))

The problem is that you can’t wait till you’re on the spot to post the collateral. Consider the extreme case that the mechanism passes up most of the items and now you’re up with a 99% chance of paying the bill. If you can now decide to post collateral then you’ve totally shirked your fair probability!

• SirPumpkinLongshanks

If you found this article a tiny bit sesible, then you must definitlely check out http://apps.facebook.com/thepayup – it’s a natural continuation of whats in this post
cheers!