A few days ago I saw a TV commercial where a mother was sitting down with her two children eating breakfast (or it may have been lunch). There was only one slice of bread left for their peanut butter toast so they began to argue on who would get the larger half. She gave the first child the task of cutting and the second child the first opportunity to pick which half he wanted.
This is the 1996 Brams and Taylor "Fair division" contribution to society. I recently sat on a panel at a conference and used it in one of my examples. Unlike the TV commercial, it is described in the Brams and Taylor book with cake cutting and not peanut buttered toast.
S.J. Brams and A.D. Taylor, Fair Division: from cake-cutting to dispute-resolution, Cambridge, 1996.
J. Robertson and W. Webb, Cake-cutting Algorithms, AK Peters, 1998.
I have often wondered why we have not seen this type of fairness pattern show up in IT workflow. Next time you have a fairness problem, either technical or social, see if this what game theorists call 'envy-free' strategies will help you.