Trash Economics

A recurring theme in this class’s blog posts is roommate issues solved with public choice inspired solutions. It seems that rationally acting young adults with defined preferences living with peers for the first time in their lives creates occasional conflicts of interest. One of my significant experiences with this occurred a year ago, when my roommates and I were deciding on the color for a new large kitchen trash can. Once we began articulating our preferences for trash can color, a problem became clear; while a couple of us preferred the color Mocha to the alternatives (Stone, Brown, White, and Black), Mocha was strongly opposed by a roommate initialed AW, who hated the color. It became clear that Mocha would win a majority of the votes, despite AW’s strong negative sentiment towards the color. Our solution was to rank the colors and assign points to each color based on how it finished in everyone’s rankings. Each color would receive four points for a first place vote, three points for a second place vote, and so on. We didn’t realize it at the time, but this technique is known as the Borda Count method. The rankings were as follows:

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Despite Mocha winning a majority and being the Condorcet Winner, Stone surprisingly won using the Borda Count method, with 16 points to Mocha’s 15 points. To this day, we have a Stone trash can in our kitchen. Essentially, the decision to use Borda count instead of simple majority came down to the philosophy of what we wanted in the winning trash can color. With the Borda Count method, we chose Stone, a trash can color that was consistently liked and not as loved or hated as Mocha. Considering our intended role for the trash can, this method was appropriate. If we were deciding on something planned to be more attention grabbing, like a wall poster, a more polarizing choice might have been more fun and memorable. Instead, we wanted the trash can to pleasantly blend in to the kitchen and avoid attention. The Borda Method was successful at picking a less controversial and more consistently rated trash can color by accounting for votes below first place. With that problem solved, we just need a public choice solution to assign roommates to clean the kitchen and we’re all set.