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I find beauty in Wirt's proposed solution. It's elegant, and it's
impressive.

I also find humor in the image I get (assuming that the incentive has
worked), perhaps in a warehouse situation, with a group of employees around
me, as I try to explain why, in the second year of the bonus, the amount of
bonus money these guys received went down, for better attendance.

'You see, I used successive approximations to determine an exponential
factor with which to  distribute the bonus money, see... and this year, the
exponent was closer to one, bowing the line less and more closely
approximating a straight line, see...'

I would hate for those to be my last words... Someone does have to decide
what they consider fair. One view would be that it is a bonus, no one owes
them a bonus, and they should appreciate whatever they get, and in one
sense, they are competing with their co-workers for a share of the bonus. A
contrary view says that fairness means even-handed consistency.