Why You Did Not See Me at the Duke Game This Weekend

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 4^th 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 1/10^th 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. 

Costs of Collective Action in Nashville

On a recent trip to Nashville with friends, I was able to experience firsthand Buchanan and Tullock’s theory that collective action, just like private action, imposes externalities for the individual. When planning our itinerary, the Type A personality in the group (let’s call her Sharon) took control of the planning. Because I did not protest to Sharon’s self proclamation of itinerary czar, I incurred high external costs in that I had to endure costs as a result of the actions of others in the form of partaking in activities around Nashville I would not have otherwise chosen to pay for. For example, this dictator like decision-making structure resulted in an itinerary that allowed for much more time for shopping than I would have personally chosen. Now, according to Buchanan and Tullock, if I were a rational individual, I would try to choose a decision-making rule that would minimize the costs I expected to incur, at the time of constitutional formation aka the itinerary formation stage.

However, by passively allowing the Type A person to take over, my decision costs where extremely low or near zero. Here we define decision-making costs as: the costs one can expect to incur while participating in the whole set of collective actions defined by a single activity. This is a silver lining to my high external costs. Next time, I will advocate for a unanimous decision-making structure, to better protect my interests and to eliminate unwanted external costs. If that is not possible, I will act more rationally to maximize my own utility by either entering voluntary contracts that reduce externalities or by pushing for itinerary formation requirements that permit private decisions to be replaced by collective decisions instead.

Practice Rooms in Old Cabell Hall

Old Cabell Hall is the current home of UVA’s music department, and it has twelve practice modules. With over 16,000 undergraduate students, UVA has only twelve spaces in which student musicians can practice. So, as you can imagine, during busy hours (anytime between 11 AM and 5 PM), there is a giant waitlist for these rooms, excluding any student who can’t wait in Old Cabell for several hours in the middle of the day from using the practice modules at all during those times. This creates substantial deadweight loss – this public good is seriously underprovided, and the quality of the good is quite poor as well (the practice rooms are very small and stuffy, making very unsuitable acoustic spaces for most instruments). However, there is no incentive to create more practice rooms or to improve the ones we do have, because the Music Department would not gain anything directly from providing better options, and no students would fund it themselves because of the Free Rider problem.

However, there is a solution. If students were able to rent these practice facilities during peak hours rather than use them for free, those who need to use them most (e.g. Performance Concentration majors, students with especially loud instruments that cannot be practiced in dorms, students practicing for an upcoming audition, etc.) would be much more likely to be able to use these facilities, and students for whom the benefits do not outweigh the costs would practice elsewhere, or at a different time. I bet you’re wondering what the Music Department could do with all of the funds from their new rental fees. Create new practice modules, perhaps. Maybe even work on the acoustics of the ones that already exist. The possibilities are vast, but not as vast as the room for improvement from our current system!

Small Referenda and Voting Incentives

            Being home for fall break requires some adjustment. While driving to pick my little sister up from school I thought traffic was going slower than usual. I then saw that one of the lanes had been closed and barriers were put up to create a protected bike lane. Since then, I’ve found out that this bike lane was just one of many protected bike lanes created by the city in an effort to get 33% of traffic in the city to travel by means other than cars. My informal polls consisting of complaining to many of the people I know signal that this law isn’t very popular in the community.

However, the passage of this law despite its unpopularity makes some sense given our voting model. Voters make voting decisions based on a combination of the value (|V2 - V1|) of their vote to them times the probability of being the deciding vote, and the civic duty and social pressures they feel to vote. While the social pressures and civic duty are prominent in large elections, I know I felt very little pressure to vote in the off year referendum on protected bike lanes — the primary driver to vote was the effect my vote would have on my life.

The difference to me, a non-biker, was minimal. My average drive would be increased by 6 seconds by the measure — if I value my time at $30 an hour, this cost is $0.05 per drive, so if I drive 2,000 times over the course of my living here, the measure costs me around $100, with no benefit. If one quarter of the eligible population (40,000) votes, my expected cost is around $100/10,000, or one cent. This is much less than my costs of voting (it takes 15 minutes, so $7.50). Since my expected benefit of voting is less than the costs, I don’t vote. Bikers, however, get a ton of benefit from the measure if it passes — commuting to work every day by bike is a joy to them worth $30/ride, and not having to buy a car is worth $25,000. If they have the same number of rides I do, their expected benefit is (30*2,000+25,000)/10,000 or $8.50. If bikers value their time the same as I do, it’s worth voting for them, as their expected benefits ($8.50) exceed their voting costs ($7.50). Since our model shows why it’s logical for bikers to vote, and for non-bikers to abstain, it makes sense how a law that was unpopular with the non-biking majority was able to pass. So while I’m now burdened with slightly longer car rides, it may well have been the result of rational voting decisions that led me to this situation.