Forget About the Ticket Lottery
Feb 12th 2008eCollege Basketball
What would you do for Duke-UNC tickets? If you answered “stand in front of a thousand people and drink a mixture of raw eggs, feathers, and leg hair while dressed in a speedo,” well, somebody already did it.
The aforementioned display of human ingenuity was part of UNC’s annual “What Would You Do For Dook Tickets” contest, the place where students can be their true disgusting selves and still maintaining an air of socially acceptability. In case you were wondering, the team that finished 2nd drank a mixture of raw fish, clam juice, wet dog food, cheez whiz, and tobacco dip spit.
Nice work. You really showed Duke who’s better. Dogs don’t even eat wet dog food.
Anyway, I’m not mentioning all of this to show the great failures in our education system. I’m mentioning this because in many ways UNC’s contest is an excellent (and by “excellent” I mean “economically efficient”) method of giving out tickets.
The way to generate the most utility is to give the tickets to the people who value them the most. The easiest way to do that is to give them to the people who are willing to pay the most. Unfortunately, this isn’t fair to the people currently going through monetary complications. We live in a relatively moral society, and that’s why most tickets are not sold in auction by Sotheby’s.
But there are other ways to get tickets to the people who value them the most. Regrettably, rather than thinking of a way to do this, many schools just have a lottery. This is why UNC’s contest is so great. It’s a non-monetary way for students to show that they value the tickets the most. Sure, it discriminates against people with weak stomachs, but that’s better than discriminating against poor college students.
Here’s my point. Schools should try harder to find a way to get tickets into the hands of students who want them the most. Why not reserve a few hundred tickets and have a series of contests. Give some to people who wait in line the longest. For people who don’t have that kind of time, there could be a trivia contest or a short essay contest. Almost anything can be used as a way to find those students who will get the most utility out of their tickets. It won’t solve the mortgage crisis, but it will make a few die-hard college basketball fans a little happier.
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