While walking, a friend and avid pickleball player shared she had “used tennis courts when pickleball courts were full but felt bad about it. They hate that.”
This didn’t sit well with my inner economist. Tennis courts are accessible to all UVA students; why can’t they be used in whatever way maximizes students' utility? If pickleball courts are overpopulated and tennis ones are not, the market is demanding more pickleball than tennis. Why is moral wrongdoing placed on pickleball players?
To approach this situation from a Coasian perspective, I considered property rights. According to social norms, pickleball courts belong to pickleball players and tennis courts belong to tennis players. UVA’s online court booking system helps assume low transaction costs.
The irreciprocal nature of court usage–tennis courts can be used for pickleball but pickleball courts are too short for tennis–means pickleball players always impose on tennis players’ property rights. In order to most efficiently use university resources, pickleball players could pay damages to tennis players for their repurposed court time slots. From a practical perspective, however, delineating people who were genuinely planning on playing tennis from those booking online slots just to resell them would be challenging.
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