Water in a lifeboat
About 3–6 minutes · One starting situation and two variations
Choose a way to allocate a limited shared resource.
Content note
Includes a fictional emergency and uncertain survival. No survivor is selected or simulated.
Choose another experimentNo agreement in advance
Four adults share a lifeboat with divisible water equal to three sufficient individual shares. They prepared it collectively. One person is more dehydrated than the other three.
No one knows when rescue will arrive or the survival chances of any allocation. They made no agreement about distribution before departure.
Which allocation procedure would you choose?
- Divide the water equally
- Give priority to the person in greater need
- Use a lottery to assign the sufficient shares