Daily Archives: April 3, 2007

Paradox of Choice: Jazzfest Edition

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Michael Giberson

By inclination I’m not favorably inclined toward the thesis of Barry Schwartz’s book, The Paradox of Choice: Why Less Is More. More choices a bad thing? Nah, my attitude is more “Don’t worry, be happy.” (Daniel Gilbert, in Stumbling on Happiness, helped me out a little here. Apparently people who want to ‘optimize’ become overwhelmed by more choices, while ‘satisficers’ just are happy to have a selection to choose from and don’t get all knotted up over which precise combination of things will be just right.)

Bonerama's MullenNew Orleans is certainly more of a laid back, satisficer’s kind of place, and a quick trip there should be and is just the sort of thing I like. But Jazzfest — more formally the New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival — gives me a taste of what the ‘paradox of choice’ must feel like for you optimizers out there.

It is just too much, too good, and practically all happening at once. Just to pick the first day of this six-days-over-two-weekends event as an example: Surely I must go see Dr. John on Friday afternoon, but that means missing T-Bone Burnett appearing at almost the same time on the stage at the far end of the Fairgrounds. Then there is Bonerama, Trombone Shorty, and the James Carter Organ Trio. All worth seeing, and all pretty much at the same time, and all spread out over different stages. I was going to trek up to see Bonerama in Baltimore a week or two ago, but thought, “Oh, I’ll see them in a few weeks at Jazzfest.” But if it means missing Dr. John (and T-Bone Burnett and…). It’s just too much.

Marcia Ball 2006Later Friday is Van Morrison. Not a New Orleans act, but they like to bring in a little fresh blood, and how can I miss him if he’s there on stage after Dr. John? Course, at the same time on another stage is Mr. “When a man loves a woman” himself, Percy Sledge. And Kermit Ruffins & the Barbeque Swingers – you can’t get much more New Orleans than Kermit Ruffins — or Geno Delafose & French Rockin’ Boogie over on the Fais do do stage. My head spins just thinking about all of these choices.

HOB is Certified to Re-Open after KatrinaThen there is Saturday and Sunday.

Maybe that Barry Schwartz was on to something. (To keep this post at a reasonable length, I’m only hitting the highpoints. They run about 10 stages all day, all of the time, and even if you’ve never heard of the band on whatever stage you happen to be passing by, they’re good and you can sit down and enjoy it.)

But even with all the paradox-of-choice-head-spinning I suffer through when the stage-by-stage schedule comes out, I still volunteer for the trip. In fact, I’m looking forward to the day that I’ll be able to suffer through both weekends.

Supreme Court Mass. vs. EPA Decision

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Lynne Kiesling

For those of you interested in intelligent legal analysis of yesterday’s Supreme Court decision in the Massachusetts vs. EPA case, see Jonathan Adler’s post and the links he provides at Volokh. See also this thread of his earlier comments on the decision, and this extensive Google News search of articles on the decision.

I have not been following the case closely, so I will avoid saying stupid things off the top of my head and just send you to Jon. He talks a lot about legal standing, and whether or not the states do have legal standing to sue the EPA in cases like this. Chief Justice Roberts dissented from the opinion on precisely this point.

I encourage you to read Jon’s NRO column, which does a very nice job of laying out the implications of the decision. After skimming the opinions and some of the news articles, my primary concern is that this ruling will lead to lots of money spent in federal bureaucratic processes and climate change litigation that may or may not lead to improved outcomes, and I think that money would be better spent in figuring out ways to reduce transaction costs and make Coasian bargaining among the various parties easier.

As with so many things, the lawyers will see most of the benefit from this, and as Jon points out, it’s not even clear that we can meet the climate-related policy objectives that this ruling is meant to serve.

And as much as I usually agree with John Whitehead, I disagree with him when he says

… you should think that CO2 is a pollutant, since it is an outcome of production and consumption that harms a third party (i.e., it is a negative externality). This gives government the, er, obligation to regulate to improve economic efficiency (i.e., social welfare).

Now, John may come back and tell me that he has some hidden sarcasm HTML code around that statement … but I’m gonna take it at face value. That statement is way, way, way too Pigouvian for my taste, and way, way, way too Pigouvian to be good public policy. Particularly with something like CO2, which is an organic by-product of organic processes (yes, I am classifying combustion as an organic process), it is all the more important to remember Coase’s characterization of the problem as reciprocal, because it’s about conflicting uses of a scarce resource over which property rights are insufficiently well-defined to resolve the conflict.

Concert Tickets and the Beauty of Market Processes

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Lynne Kiesling

So the KP Spouse and I had OK Go/Snow Patrol tickets for last night’s show at the Aragon in Chicago. In a colossal spate of bad timing, I got on a writing roll at about 4:00, and although I’ve not been having writer’s block, I’ve been having enough trouble working on a coherent conceptual framework for the writing I’m working on that I didn’t want to disturb the roll I was on. Plus I am more of the Snow Patrol fan in the house.

So I made the executive decision not to go to the concert (fear not; we’ve seen both bands in concert before, so it’s OK). In hindsight it turned out to be the right decision; I got some important stuff worked out last night.

But that meant that I had two tickets that had cost me $40 each, and they were tickets to a sold out show. So what’s a girl to do? Sell, sell, sell!

Luckily I live only about 9 blocks from the concert venue, so I zipped over there, determined that my range of terms of trade was between $30 (face value) and $40 (with the Ticketmaster “convenience charge”, bloody monopolists) per ticket. I asked a few people within a +/- one-block radius of the Aragon; a couple of folks who are clearly ticket arbitrageurs but not in the target market demographic for the bands thought that $40/ticket was too steep. Shouldn’t they have known that this was a sold out show, and that OK Go’s YouTube dance video is all the rage? But in truth, they knew that they had to get them from me under face in order for them to make a profit. No dice.

So I strolled back and forth past the el stop a couple of times, and watched a young couple standing there looking around expectantly. I plucked up my courage and asked them if they were looking for tickets, and as it happened, they were. Cool!

But here’s the interesting thing: I was totally honest with them, and told them what I paid ($80) and what the face value was ($60, which they could see from examining the tickets). The gentleman of the couple proposed paying me $70, which I accepted. We shared a little sociable chit-chat about the music, smiled and thanked each other, and that was it. I was back home and writing furiously within half an hour, and the whole way back I was yelling to myself (quietly, in my head), The plenitude of capitalism! The beauty of market processes! Sure, I could have tried to make a profit, but at that point the opportunity cost of my time was so high that I was willing to take the $10 (and foregoing the concert experience) hit, just so I could get back to my writing and let the ideas pour out. Mutually beneficial exchange, baby!

Here’s another interesting thing about the experience: note that he proposed to split the difference with me. This is a robust outcome that happens over and over and over in experiments. Splitting the difference satisfies our notions of fairness, and also economizes on bargaining time and costs. I suspect that he wouldn’t have been so inclined to split the difference with me if I hadn’t been so honest with him about the face value of the tickets and the “convenience charge” I paid.

Although I am sad to have missed a concert of two fun bands that I like a lot, all in all this was a very positive experience. In addition to making really good progress on an important piece of writing, I ended up with a great story to tell that illustrates the beauty, civility, and humanity inherent in peaceful, mutually beneficial, voluntary exchange.

That’s a good night’s work.

Agenda Released for FERC Conference on Market Monitoring

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Michael Giberson

Twenty-three panelists are on the agenda of Thursday’s technical conference on power market monitoring, including market monitors from the RTOs/ISOs, RTO/ISO senior management, outside specialists/critics, state regulators and market participants. Overall looks like a good crowd of folks, but it is a rather large crowd to get through in just five hours of discussion. The format may produce more sound bites on market monitoring than extended reflections on the state of the art (but then that’s why we have blogs, right?).

The show will be webcast live, beginning at 9 AM EDT, and archived for later viewing. (Find the link to the webcast and other information on this page.)