Practice Rooms in Old Cabell Hall

Old Cabell Hall is the current home of UVA’s music department, and it has twelve practice modules. With over 16,000 undergraduate students, UVA has only twelve spaces in which student musicians can practice. So, as you can imagine, during busy hours (anytime between 11 AM and 5 PM), there is a giant waitlist for these rooms, excluding any student who can’t wait in Old Cabell for several hours in the middle of the day from using the practice modules at all during those times. This creates substantial deadweight loss – this public good is seriously underprovided, and the quality of the good is quite poor as well (the practice rooms are very small and stuffy, making very unsuitable acoustic spaces for most instruments). However, there is no incentive to create more practice rooms or to improve the ones we do have, because the Music Department would not gain anything directly from providing better options, and no students would fund it themselves because of the Free Rider problem.

However, there is a solution. If students were able to rent these practice facilities during peak hours rather than use them for free, those who need to use them most (e.g. Performance Concentration majors, students with especially loud instruments that cannot be practiced in dorms, students practicing for an upcoming audition, etc.) would be much more likely to be able to use these facilities, and students for whom the benefits do not outweigh the costs would practice elsewhere, or at a different time. I bet you’re wondering what the Music Department could do with all of the funds from their new rental fees. Create new practice modules, perhaps. Maybe even work on the acoustics of the ones that already exist. The possibilities are vast, but not as vast as the room for improvement from our current system!

Small Referenda and Voting Incentives

            Being home for fall break requires some adjustment. While driving to pick my little sister up from school I thought traffic was going slower than usual. I then saw that one of the lanes had been closed and barriers were put up to create a protected bike lane. Since then, I’ve found out that this bike lane was just one of many protected bike lanes created by the city in an effort to get 33% of traffic in the city to travel by means other than cars. My informal polls consisting of complaining to many of the people I know signal that this law isn’t very popular in the community.

However, the passage of this law despite its unpopularity makes some sense given our voting model. Voters make voting decisions based on a combination of the value (|V2 - V1|) of their vote to them times the probability of being the deciding vote, and the civic duty and social pressures they feel to vote. While the social pressures and civic duty are prominent in large elections, I know I felt very little pressure to vote in the off year referendum on protected bike lanes — the primary driver to vote was the effect my vote would have on my life.

The difference to me, a non-biker, was minimal. My average drive would be increased by 6 seconds by the measure — if I value my time at $30 an hour, this cost is $0.05 per drive, so if I drive 2,000 times over the course of my living here, the measure costs me around $100, with no benefit. If one quarter of the eligible population (40,000) votes, my expected cost is around $100/10,000, or one cent. This is much less than my costs of voting (it takes 15 minutes, so $7.50). Since my expected benefit of voting is less than the costs, I don’t vote. Bikers, however, get a ton of benefit from the measure if it passes — commuting to work every day by bike is a joy to them worth $30/ride, and not having to buy a car is worth $25,000. If they have the same number of rides I do, their expected benefit is (30*2,000+25,000)/10,000 or $8.50. If bikers value their time the same as I do, it’s worth voting for them, as their expected benefits ($8.50) exceed their voting costs ($7.50). Since our model shows why it’s logical for bikers to vote, and for non-bikers to abstain, it makes sense how a law that was unpopular with the non-biking majority was able to pass. So while I’m now burdened with slightly longer car rides, it may well have been the result of rational voting decisions that led me to this situation.

Rational Voting in Party Planning

I am in an a cappella group on grounds, and we are very democratic. We have to hold a vote in order to do anything, even when deciding to have a party. Last week when we were deciding whether or not to have a party, I went through the process of voting like a rational voter would. It would seem like the rational thing to do would be to vote, because there is little personal time involved with me voting – all I have to do is make my decision and send a quick text to our Social Chair.

However, to Johnson, voting would be irrational in my case. Firstly, as a fourth-year college student, my time costs are extremely high. Taking the time to vote on whether or not to have this party is valuable time that I could be using to do schoolwork, eat or sleep. Although the act of voting takes a second, casting an informed vote requires careful consideration of who’s going to be at the party, how long the party will be, the opportunity costs of going to the party, etc., which takes a decent amount of time. Secondly, the outcome differential was minimal for me. Having the party would not have given me substantially higher utility than not having the party. I had work due the next day, and I wouldn't have been able to do work that night had I attended a party. Lastly, my vote had little probability of affecting the decision. Even though there are only 14 of us, this party was going to be with our good friends from another UVA a cappella group, and I knew that a lot of our guys would vote to have this party because of that. Ultimately, my expected marginal benefit did not exceed my marginal cost of voting, and so I didn’t vote.

As I expected, we ended up having the party, but I attended and actually had a great time. Music from Earth Wind & Fire rang through the night, as it was the 21^st of September. Although my actual benefit from attending the party was greater than my expected benefit of doing so, I'm not surprised at my abstention from voting given my understanding of the rational voting theory.