I usually never go to UVA football
games. Something about standing on the hill for four hours under the hot sun
watching my team lose just doesn’t sound very appealing to me. I could be using
that time on Saturday to do something else, such as getting my public choice
homework done. Therefore, my opportunity cost of that time is pretty high,
probably around $10 an hour. Additionally, I have other costs of going to football games, such as transportation to the stadium and buying food/water. The overall MC of attending a football game is close to $50 for me. I also don’t
particularly enjoy football, so I derive no utility from watching, and my
friends do not exert any sort of pressure on me to attend.
However, I saw an email last week
that piqued my interest in the upcoming game against Duke. The subject line was
“Hoo
Wants a Chance at Free Tuition?!” and within it, UVa offered in-state
tuition to one student for the spring semester. All the student had to do was
come to the football game to be entered in the raffle and be present at the 4th
quarter in order to receive it. The model we developed in class to evaluate the
costs and benefits of voting came in handy when I made the decision whether or
not to attend the game. My expected marginal benefit of attending the game was
the amount of tuition, which is around $6,500 for one semester of in state,
multiplied by the probability that I would win. There are currently 15,891
undergraduates at UVa. If we assume that approximately 1/10th of
students attend the game, then I have a 1/1,590 (0.063%) chance of winning. My
expected marginal benefit is ($6,500)*(0.00063) = $4.08.
As you can
see, my MC ($50) is much greater than my expected marginal benefit ($4.08) and
that is why I did not go to the Duke game this Saturday. Maybe I have no school spirit, or maybe I'm just being rational.
1 comment:
So you're telling me that you derive ZERO utility from seeing the Devil beaten by the 'Hoos? I could understand your absence from the game in the event that we were playing an opponent like Clemson where expected utility is very low due to low chances and not a huge reward in the event of victory (it's football). But we had a decent chance of beating Duke with our 3-1 record going into it. Additionally, the utility gained from seeing Duke lose at any activity is normally quite high for UVA students, so I'd expect a good amount of social pressure to go.
Post a Comment