About a week ago my housemates had the genius idea to purchase an inflatable hot tub. Although the novelty of it has started to wear off for me, my housemates still find it enjoyable at all hours of the day. This is an issue for me because the tub lays directly next to my bedroom window directly above my desk. I can hear every word of tub talk through my window and hot tubbers have a direct look into my room. Our house also lacks outlets outside so the tub is plugged in through an extension cord running through my window into my room.
The private costs of using the hot tub are very low. The price of electricity to run an inflatable hot tub is about $.20, and each time someone uses the hottub it takes about 3 hours to warm up the tub to its previous temperature. This means that the PMC of using the hot tub is about $.60/8 housemates. The social cost of this is much higher as it impedes my ability to sleep or complete work(as it currently is). Since I have property rights over my room, there is a very simple Coasian solution I could choose to implement. In order to increase the PMC closer to SMC I could ask that my housemates pay me a fee when they use the hottub. I am able to enforce these property rights by threatening to unplug the extension cord that runs into my room. I would prefer to write about newer public choice topics from class, but currently this is the only public choice issue I can focus on and I must submit a blog in the next hour.
