In my sorority, house dinner is catered every night, Sunday-Wednesday, by Flavor Catering. All members are required to buy house dinner for at least one night each week, every week for the entire semester, at the beginning of every semester. Girls that live in the house, however, are required to buy three nights of house dinner. This semester, I bought house dinner for Tuesday nights. However, I lived in the house last year, and bought three nights a week for two semesters, and know that there is always extra food on Sunday nights because they expect most people to eat house dinner that night. Because I have this knowledge, if I am at the house before dinner on Sunday nights, for chapter or other events, I will typically stay and eat the Sunday night dinner, despite the fact that I only paid for one dinner a week on Tuesday nights.
I am an active contributor to the free-rider problem in this instance. Because I know that there is always extra food on Sundays, and I know that they are not going to object to just one more person eating dinner than is supposed to be, I take advantage of available food that is difficult to exclude people from eating and get a free meal. If more people use this knowledge to their advantage and ate house dinner on nights that they did not pay for, then the sorority may have to start making house dinner available to everyone by charging for it in dues, effectively making house dinner a public good for sorority members, or restrict house dinner to only girls that live in the house, preventing people like me from free-riding and taking free meals whenever we want one, regardless of which night we actually bought dinner for.
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