I have a confession to make: I'm not really into basketball. Maybe it's because I'm vertically challenged. Maybe it's because I don't like the sound of sneakers squeaking against wooden floors. Maybe it's because I lack the competition-loving Y chromosome (that explanation is the so-called Lawrence Summers theory).
When my undergraduate alma mater, the University of Kentucky, won the NCAA men's basketball tournament in 1996 and 1998, I politely smiled. My classmates overturned cars.
As a native of Lexington, Ky., and a graduate of the University of Kentucky, you can only imagine the horror I evoked last year when I told my hometown friends that I was joining the Dark Side-Duke University.
"Traitor!" they scolded me. Memories of Christian Laettner's game-winning shot with under a second left on the clock during the 1992 NCAA tournament still remain vivid in the minds of UK basketball fans.
Naturally then, I find the GPSC-coordinated basketball campout an immensely curious phenomenon. People actually camp for 36 hours with virtually no sleep just to enter-repeat: just to enter-a lottery! I can appreciate it and respect it, but I'll never quite be able to understand it. I mean, I'm one of the people who gets upset when Sunday afternoon football runs over and delays the normal 7 p.m. start of 60 Minutes.
Having studied some economics last year, I hypothesize that the allure of campout all boils down to: willingness to pay. How much are Duke's graduate and professional (G&P) students willing to pay, both monetarily and non-monetarily, to acquire a season basketball ticket?
Supply is artificially constrained to 700 tickets, each sold for $150. But as Point A in Figure 1 shows, more than 700 G&P students want those tickets at that price. If we were heartless capitalists we'd just create a GPSC EBay and auction the tickets to the highest bidders, thereby gaining much of the consumer surplus depicted by trapezoid BCDE. But no! Equity had to get in the way. If we let price ration the tickets, they'd all go to the soon-to-be-wealthy Fuqua kids, while those sixth-year humanities Ph.D. students would be left to watch the games on television.
This is where campout injects some equity into the whole process by bringing something other than price into the picture, as shown by the intertemporal budget constraint in Figure 2. Line AF shows that students will sacrifice future income (as approximated by end-of-semester GPA) for the present consumption of fun. If you're a studious Dukie, you'll be up by Point A and be unwilling to waste 36 hours camping out. If you're a slacker Dukie, you'll be down by Point F, where you hedonistically live for the moment and camp out for however long it takes-and for whatever GPA sacrifice you'll incur-just to enter the lottery.
GPSC's website lists 2,070 G&P students as being registered for campout. With 700 tickets to be distributed, the probability of winning one, p(Tix), can be expressed mathematically as:
p(Tix) = f1(Ability to Not Sleep) + f2(Temperature) + f3(Rain) + f4(# of Weekends Until Midterms) + e(Serendipity)
One of my classmates suggested that tickets be distributed by GPA. What?! Create an incentive for us to study? No thanks. I'll just stand out of the way while the rest of you camp out. It'll make it that much easier for you to win the lottery.
Preeti Aroon is a graduate student in public policy. Her column runs every other Wednesday.
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