I’m not sure whether to be proud or embarrassed by this post. I’ll let you be the judge. We’re settling in to our seats on a plane, and we don’t have 5 seats together. So the kids start haggling over who sits where (usually the debate is focused on Maya and Gabi not wanting to sit next to each other). So they had their “assigned” seats from the boarding passes, and being the economist in me, I told them to setup a market and trade. Initial random assignments should not determine final allocations. Great lesson in both auction theory and the Coase theorem!
So I helped them setup a second price sealed bid auction (yes, others saw this happening and we got some strange looks). It worked, in a sense that everyone accepted the decisions and recognized the process as fair. But Max made off like a bandit (got $5 from Maya), because Maya and Gabi overbid and had tons of regret later. But they learned a bit about how the auction works…
We're now back home for a week, nice to be here for a bit... next week we do a mini-tour of the South, visit the civil rights museum in Greensboro, and not sure what else yet.
-- Dean
No comments:
Post a Comment