Ryan Greenberg

President Clinton is speaking at UC Berkeley next week. Tickets were available to students who filled out an online form starting at 7:00am this morning. Predictably, at 6:59am the website offering tickets looked like this:

Judging by messages on Twitter, hundreds of other students had the same experience. At 7:39am, tickets were sold out.

Despite being awake and online at the right time, I never even saw the form. I’m not upset or tremendously disappointed, but this experience started me thinking about the process of distribution. This is the fourth or fifth time I’ve participated in an online offer in the last year, and they always leave me with the sense that they’re not fair. In this situation I think fair means that every person who is eligible to receive a ticket and wants one has an equal chance to receive one. ¹

The issue is that this system relies on first-come, first-served rationing (FCFS) for a scarse resource. FCFS is pretty well understood in the physical world. We know that people can only be in one place at a time: each person gets a single spot in line. Whoever shows up first, or camps out overnight, will get to see the movie first. Incidentally, these practices are exactly why organizers want to move to an online system. Real-world FCFS means large, unwieldy crowds and groups of students who set up tents on campus.

An online version of first-come, first-served solves these problems: when people vie for a resource online (on the Internet, or calling by phone), they don’t form massive crowds outside your door or camp on your porch. Without the restrictions of the physical world, however, FCFS is different online. I can get 10 places in line just by loading a page in my browser 10 times. If I am handy with programming, I might be able to get hundreds of places in line by writing a script to connect on my behalf. If I have a slow Internet connection, or I’m positioned at a certain point on the network, I might never be able to get in line because the server is too busy. In short, online FCFS has a chance at being fair only if your servers can handle the load and you can prevent people from taking multiple places in line.

A natural next question might be how you can prepare your servers for the demand created by an event like this. People who know a lot more than I do about IT might suggest things like caching, replicated servers, faster machines, and more memory. But this misses the real problem: online FCFS is not a good approximation of fair.

A better alternative is an online lottery. Instead of awarding tickets based on whoever arrives first, you provide a window during which anybody can obtain a lottery number. Then you randomly select people using a computer and give them tickets. This system solves the same problems that online FCFS does: there are no large crowds and no camping out. It also solves some of the problems with FCFS. Since you can get a lottery number at any time during the window, network traffic will be spread out across this time. And since awards are based on random chance,² a lottery is more fair because every ticket holder has an equal chance.

Of course, there are some similar problems. If the window to get a lottery ticket isn’t large enough everyone who wants a ticket won’t have a chance to get one—not fair. Also, the problem of multiple people in line is now replaced with the problem of multiple lottery tickets. People will find ways to get multiple lottery tickets, increasing their odds of being selected. But I don’t think that ballot stuffing is a much greater problem than having multiple spots in line. With a lottery system you can deal with ballot stuffing on your own time instead of in real time.

In the controlled circumstances of the Clinton ticket giveaway, stuffing is nearly impossible. Each student has a unique student ID number which can be checked to ensure that each person gets only one lottery number. And since each student can only obtain a single ticket for this event for personal use (confirmed with photo ID when claiming the ticket), people cannot use their friends to get extra lottery numbers.

The only downside to a lottery is that it requires more work. With online FCFS you can just tell people to come, watch your server buckle under the load, and eventually give away all the tickets. Online FCFS is also fine if you’re not interested in fair. I don’t mean this in a pejorative sense. If you’re selling concert tickets, you get paid no matter who buys them; there’s no obvious incentive for fair distribution.³

Given the detailed instructions for distributing tickets, it seems like Berkeley does want to be fair about the process. Next time, I suggest they consider a lottery.

¹ Of course there are other definitions for fair. If you understand fair in a different sense (like “following an defined process for distribution”) then this system may well be fair. I am using fair as equitable because I think that is a popular understanding of fair. ↩

² Computers only generate pseudorandom numbers, but these are random enough for our needs. ↩

³ There might be external repercussions for distribution using a process that isn’t perceived as fair. The New Yorker ran an article last summer, “The Price of the Ticket” addressing this issue as it applies to Ticketmaster and fishy practices selling tickets. ↩