Who gets the last two hundred

An illustrator in Jeddah makes a run of two hundred prints of one drawing and announces the date. Three thousand people say they want one. Two hundred will get one. Whatever she does next, she will disappoint most of them, so the real question is how.

She can sell to whoever arrives first. It sounds fair, and it does reward people who care enough to set an alarm and refresh the page at nine. But it is a tax paid in time and luck. The student with a free morning beats the nurse on a shift, and how much either of them wanted it had nothing to do with the outcome.

She can let the price rise until only two hundred people are still bidding. Nothing is wasted on waiting, and the money goes to the person who made the work. But it hands every print to whoever can spare the most, and the people who loved her first, when she had fifty followers, may be priced out of the thing they helped make possible.

Or she can draw names. Let her earliest buyers, or anyone willing to put down a small deposit, enter, and pick at random. Of the three, it is the fairest. Nobody who misses out can blame themselves for being slow or for being short of money. They were simply unlucky, and bad luck is easier to forgive than a system.

None of these is the correct answer. Each produces a different kind of disappointment in the many, and a different kind of joy in the few.

The maker does not get to avoid the feelings. She only gets to choose which ones she will be answerable for.