Wonderful friends, but free-riding roommates

I currently live with two of my closest friends here at UVA, and they are quite wonderful young women. My only grievance with them is that they free-ride off of my high standards of cleanliness. While we each have our own room and I have my own bathroom (don’t know what my mental stability would be like if I didn’t), we also have a lovely kitchen, dining room, and living room, all of which are very inviting thanks to our collective decoration efforts. None of us have desks in our rooms, thus we all do work in the common spaces. I view these spaces as public goods shared amongst the three of us, as we can’t exactly close the door to the kitchen or dining room to prevent others from coming in.

A clean home is a happy home. Individual efforts to keep it orderly and clean bestow group benefits. However, my roommates have exhibited a reluctance to contribute voluntarily to such benefits. There have been multiple times where I have had to delegate tasks for them to do: start and then unload the dishwasher; take out the trashcan that is now overflowing because I tried waiting to see if they’d take it out on their own; and wiping all of the crumbs, flour, and oil off of the counters, as we all cook pretty much every day. Though it means that they get to enjoy the benefit of a beautifully clean home without contributions equal to mine, the private benefits it brings me outweigh the costs of my individual time it takes up to not only pick up my own messes, but theirs as well. 

Though I've accepted the situation for what it is, I don't believe this is too much to ask. 

Alas. 

The Police Station in My Backyard

In November 2015, my hometown of Lorton, Virginia passed a resolution to build a new police station and animal shelter in the community. Lorton is located in Northern Virginia, and lays on I-95 between the City of Fairfax and Woodbridge. To my family’s surprise, Lorton decided the best place to construct the new police station and animal shelter was less than a block away from my house (shown on map below).

The sound pollution created by police sirens and dogs from the animal shelter barking can be treated as a negative production externality.  Interestingly, during a presentation for the Homeowner’s Association, the woman in charge of the project actually said that dog barking would typically be heard when they were let out to play, which she nonchalantly mentioned would be around 6:30 a.m.  Here, the social marginal costs that the police station/animal shelter imposes are greater than the private marginal costs, creating the negative production externality.  

For a resident in the City of Fairfax or Woodbridge, however, the presence of a police force in my “backyard” would create a positive consumption externality. For example, my grandparents are residents of the City of Fairfax, and since they would not pay for the increased safety services of the police station, but indirectly benefit from said increased safety services, the social marginal benefit of the increased Lorton police presence is greater than the private marginal benefit of those who directly pay for the service, and can be treated as a positive consumption externality.

Ultimately, the Homeowner’s Association (including both of my parents) came out vehemently against the chosen location.  However, the County has yet to make a final decision.

NBA MVP Voting

We mentioned in class briefly that many sports polls are done by the Borda Count in which the voters rank teams or players and the teams/players get points based on how they are ranked. I decided to explore if there had been any controversies due to the use of this type of election system. As a basketball fan, I looked into NBA MVP voting over the last couple decades. For context, the NBA MVP voting system is a modified Borda count method in which voters rank their top five players and the points are distributed as 10 for 1st place, 7 for 2nd place, 5 for 3rd, 3 for 4th, and 1 for 5th.

There has only been one time since this system's inception that the player who garnered the most first-place votes did not win the MVP. In the 1990 race, Magic Johnson got 69.1% of the possible points, while Charles Barkley got 66.7%, and Michael Jordan got 62%. However, Magic Johnson got only 27 first-place votes as compared to Charles Barkley's 38 and Michael Jordan's 21. Despite Charles Barkley's significantly higher number of first-place votes, Magic Johnson received 38 second-place votes compared to Barkley's 15 and Jordan got 25. Barkley would have won a plurality system just based on voting for your top candidate, but his inability to successfully amass non-first place votes hurt him in this modified Borda count method. As the NBA didn't release full voting data until more recently, I couldn't determine the Condorcet winner in this example, but I did look into the full voting data for the last three races and all three winners using this system were also the Condorcet winner.

UNESCO and the Free-Rider Problem

This past week the US announced it will be pulling out of UNESCO, the UN’s cultural arm. UNESCO’s purpose is to spread peace and security worldwide through education, science, and culture, and to generally promote justice and human rights. The Trump administration says it is pulling out because of “mounting arrears at UNESCO, the need for fundamental reform in the organization, and continuing anti-Israel bias at UNESCO”, but regardless of the Trump administration’s opinion on UNESCO, there is clear incentive for the administration to leave the organization and free-ride by enjoying the benefits of UNESCO without paying to be a part of it.

If we just look at the costs and the benefits of being a member versus not being a member from the administration’s perspective, the decision to leave UNESCO can be explained by the free-rider problem. By leaving UNESCO the US will give up the ability to influence the policy and action of UNESCO, but the US (or at least the current administration) does not believe it has the ability to alter its policy anyways. If we make the assumption that UNESCO will basically act the same way with or without the US as a part of it then we can assume the benefits the US receives from it will be pretty much the same. When the US pulls out, UNESCO will be less well funded, but for the most part be the same, so the US has very little to lose in terms of direct benefits from UNESCO’s work and will save $500 million that it owes in unpaid past dues and millions in dues going forward. Even if the administration agreed with the policy and work of UNESCO completely, the same incentive to free-ride would exist when we assume the benefits will not change.

How Reilly's parents taught me about strategic behavior

Reilly and I have known each other since 1^st grade. We were in German immersion together in elementary school and always ended up in the same German classes all the way through high school. Luckily, we ended up liking each other and became good friends. We keep in touch largely via a group text with three other good friends, as we all go to different colleges. The group text is often used to complain about the current state of the world, ranging from current political affairs to the newest scandal of the Kardashian family.

Our group text was particularly active this past presidential election season. During our discussion of desirable properties of voting systems the other day in class, one texting exchange in particular stood out in my memory: when Reilly told us that her socially and economically liberal parents voted for Trump during the primaries! Much to our collective relief, it turns out there was a rationale to their seemingly nonsensical choice. Due to Virginia’s open primary structure, Nicole and Pat (Reilly’s parents’ names – after almost 14 years of friendship, you can bet we’re on a first-name basis with each other’s parents) chose to vote for Trump in the primary in hopes that he would win the Republican primary. They wanted Hillary to win the presidency, and were confident that if she were to go up against Trump, enough Republicans would be so disgusted with Trump’s behavior that they'd vote for a Democrat. They felt their vote was better spent in attempts to have Trump elected as the Republican candidate rather than toward Hillary for the Democratic candidacy. The results indicate their gut feeling was correct: Hillary won the Democratic primary with 64% of the vote with Bernie trailing at 35% of the vote. Trump barely squeaked ahead of Marco Rubio, 35-32.

Unfortunately, their attempts at strategic behavior during the past presidential election season were to no avail. Perhaps if Virginia, even the U.S. as a whole, had different and more Condorcet efficient methods of electing candidates, such strategic behavior could be minimized as the incentives to act in such a way would be lower.

Confederate Monuments as Public Goods

I recently watched a segment of John Oliver’s show Last Week Tonight on the debate surrounding Confederate monuments, and one particular statue caught my eye. It was a bizarre and almost comical statue of Nathan Bedford Forrest, a renowned Confederate general, located on private property along Interstate 65 in Nashville, Tennessee. To those who support the building and maintenance of statues of Confederate leaders, the statue of Forrest is a market-provided public good with positive production externalities. Not only does the statue provide something to people with something to look at and take pride in their Southern heritage, but it also has the potential to attract sight-seers and increase revenue from tourism.

However, as shown on Last Week Tonight, evidence seems to show that many Confederate statues that exist today were erected specifically to intimidate African Americans. According to the Southern Poverty Law Center, a majority of the 700 Confederate monuments in public spaces across the U.S were erected decades after the end of the Civil War, with huge spikes from 1900-1920 and during the 1950s and 60s with the proliferation of Jim Crow laws and the rise of the Civil Rights movement, respectively. This comes from the fact that certain individuals may contribute to public goods or provide them because the utility that those goods give them makes it worth it, even if they might have to pay more to make up for free-riders. People may also contribute for non-economic reasons such as altruism, from which they derive high utility. For many people and communities, the utility derived from intimidating African Americans and asserting white dominance justifies the building and maintenance of public Confederate monuments. These monuments, which glorify men that fought to keep slavery, also present a negative production externality and high social cost of devastating those whose ancestors were slaves. 

Recently, a Charlottesville judge ruled to move forward a lawsuit over the city’s plans to remove a statue of Robert E. Lee. It will be interesting to see how this and other similar cases across the country play out.  

Calling All Smoothie Lovers

Every Friday afternoon, my friend and I grab smoothies from the corner on our way back from class as a way of treating ourselves for making it through another week of classes. Fortunately for us, there are two smoothie stores conveniently located right on the corner. Looking back to the start of the semester, I was originally shocked to find out that there was going to be both a Juice Laundry and a Corner Juice opening less than 100 feet from each other right on the corner. As a dedicated smoothie consumer, I was excited to have these new locations available to grab a healthy snack and study, but I was also confused as to how these two stores with nearly homogenous products could both thrive in such close quarters to each other.

Hotelling, in his article “Stability in Competition” from The Economic Journal writes that stores with similar products will move closer to each other in order to reach the maximum number of consumers. Given the high traffic of the corner and close proximity to college students looking for healthy options and study locations, it makes sense that anywhere on the corner would be an ideal location for a business. But do we really need two smoothie stores? Anytime I have gone into Corner Juice or Juice laundry there has been a line of customers waiting to be served, so it appears that they are both doing well. Although I was confused by these competitors setting up shop so close together, I now understand that they did this to easily reach the large number of students looking for accessible healthy food and juice options, therefore maximizing their consumer base.