What Do Beer, Road Construction and Antitrust Have in Common?

You wouldn't think that that many legal concepts influence what happens when I allow cars to park on my lawn every football Saturday, but - as I hope I am at least beginning to convince you - laws and rules are everywhere and affect everything. So every Saturday, when I amble out to my driveway, set up a sign that says "Parking, EZ - OUT!" and stand there with a beer while people literally drive past me and hand me money, there are any number of systems of rules that are influencing what I do. Let's look at just a few.

Antitrust Law
No, seriously. I live at an intersection, and the owners on all four corners sell parking. And each week we yell or mosey across the street and fix our prices. It's almost always $20 (at least these days - it was less in the dark years when The Blue was awful), but it's still straight-up price fixing. It is, no doubt, a restraint of trade, which the Sherman Act expressly forbids.

I'm not going to spend a lot of time on this because the idea of a game day attendee suing the four of us under the Sherman Act is so patently ridiculous. But there are some actual legal issues that we could spend time discussing if we wanted. Is our agreement a contract? We exchange promises of a sort, that might serve as consideration. Is our commerce within Congress' power? I almost always get out of state license plates, there's a colorable argument it's "interstate." I'll stop, but hey - if you're a contracts or antitrust professor, food for thought for exam questions.

Of course, underlying all of this is what might be considered an economic "law:" supply and demand. The supply on my corner is fixed; we can only get so many cars on our lawns. But demand various on any number of axes. If Michigan sucks, demand goes down. The demand over a given period of time, at least, is different for 12:00 starts and 3:30 starts - they trickle in a lot more slowly for later games. And, as I'm learning all too concretely this year, demand varies a lot based on traffic patterns. Which brings us to:

Federal and State Bond Issues
The bridge between my house and The Big House

is under construction, as is a HUGE portion of the major road leading in from the east. These are paid for by bonds and state and federal expenditure, which are authorized by a complex set of laws. You would think this has little to do with my parking situation, but since the traffic patterns have created new bottlenecks away from my house and decreased the overall traffic on my side of town, these expenditures have made parking on my corner a lot less attractive. I assume that lawn owners on the other side of town and at the new bottlenecks have seen a substantial uptick in their traffic. Point is, infrastructural construction paid for an authorized pursuant to law have had a material effect on how parking is done around my house.


The Informal Norms of Residential Parkers
Yeah, this is a thing. My neighbors and I may all agree to a fixed $20 price at the start of the day, but it's understood that as game time approaches we can lower our prices with reprobation. What happens, you might ask, when one of us bucks the norm and decides to be a rational maximizer and undercut our neighbors? I don't know. No one has in the five years I've lived here. The norms of cooperation are pretty strong.

As are the norms that govern the parkers themselves. I never had to ask anyone to clean up, or to not grill, because the norms of parking - heck, of basic decency - meant that no one ever did something like fire up a grill without asking me first, and everyone always cleans up after themselves. And, as you might already have guessed, these aren't the only norms that influence how I go about my business on Saturdays.

The Rules of Partying
I throw a tailgate for friends on home game days pretty much without exception.

It would be weird for me to ask everyone over and then spend all day in the driveway, don't you think? There are certain expectations and rules of civility that come with hosting a party, and most Saturdays I have to make choices about when I can stay out on the driveway and usher cars in, and when I need - ok, "get" - to go back and have BBQ and some beers with my friends. It doesn't cause problems most of the time, but it's another set of etiquette considerations that play into what I do on Saturdays.

I could probably get more detailed, but I think you get the point. It seems simple. I put on a hat and sunglasses, drag my sign out to the road, open a beer (are there rules about how close to the road I can take a visible alcohol container?), and wave cars onto my lawn while collecting their cash. It's the easiest money I've ever made. But lurking in the background behind even such a fun, seemingly simple thing, there are lots of laws and informal rules that impact how I go about my business. I don't think about them all the time - I do have to get out of bed in the morning - but there they are. Something to think about if you ever come tailgate with me.

Baseball's Change

It's cold this morning in Ann Arbor (well, cold for September), which means fall is on its way, which means football season is here, which means playoff baseball will be here soon! Next week, a longer post on the norms that organically emerge in the world of game day parking in my neighborhood, but since time today must be sacrificed to the dissertation and job application gods (they are jealous gods), a few quick wonderings about the fifth playoff time in baseball will do. 

For those of you who aren't fans baseball has two leagues, with three divisions each. Until this year, each division winner made the playoffs along with one team from each league with the next best record overall called a "wild card." This year, there is a second wild card team. The two wild card teams will play each other in a one-game playoff, with the winner advancing to a five game series against one of the division winners. 

Now, even under this new, marvelously accommodating system, my Boston Red Sox will not make the playoffs. 

$175 million doesn't buy what it used to. Also the Cubs aren't even close because don't EVER forget that God hates the Cubs.

In any event, my personal tendency in situations like this is to be skeptical of altering a traditional approach. Had I been older in 1994 when the wild card was added in the first place, I think I would have bemoaned the fact that we now had divisions, and multiple series, and not simply just two League Championship Series, and the World Series. But that ship having sailed, I actually think this new system might be an improvement.

What, ideally, are we trying to do with playoffs? Hopefully we achieve two compatible goals: 1) the system, more often than not, allows the best team the best chance of winning, and 2) fans are entertained by the process. The concern with adding in a fifth team is that it reduces the best teams overall chances of winning, and I agree that if it turns out that either the fourth of fifth team in ends up winning an unusual amount of the time, then the system isn't working like it should.

But here, I think the winner of the one-game playoff between wild card teams will put the winner at a pretty big disadvantage as it moves to the next series. Presumably the wild card teams will use their best available starting pitcher for the play-in game, which means he won't be able to pitch again until Game 4 or 5 of the next series, if there IS a Game 4 or 5. It's not a deal-breaker, but it's enough of a disadvantage that I suspect the wild card teams will win less often than they used to, and I think rewarding the division winners by doing this is OK. If you don't want to burn your best pitcher in a one game playoff? Well, you should have won the division.

So let's assume for the moment that the new system isn't actually worse at giving the best team the best shot at winning, and I actually think it might give that team an extra advantage compared to the old system. I don't think the second criteria is even debatable. This is going to be wildly entertaining. One game playoffs are awesome, after which I don't anticipate any drop-off in entertainment from the rest of the post-season. Furthermore, even more teams will be playing for that extra playoff spot, so the end of the regular season  may be more exciting too.

Mere excitement would not be a good enough reason to change the rules. There might be lots of things that would make a game more exciting but would either fundamentally change the parameters of a baseball game itself, or might not further the goal of having the best team rise to the top. BUT: here I think baseball has - perhaps despite itself - found a way to enhance excitement while still maintaining such a goal.

More broadly, it's of note that the way the rules guiding post-season play are (re) structured changes the strategy of teams involved: those who are still in the hunt may elect not to test young talent, but instead chase a playoff spot, teams in the one-game playoff may elect to use their best pitcher or not depending on circumstances. The change is comparatively minor, but it's good to be mindful of the knock-on effects of a rule change.

That's all for today. Happy September!

Bachelor Party!

What function, exactly, do we expect bachelor and bachelorette parties to accomplish? It should be enough, I would think, to have the bride- or groom-to-be say at the end "that was really fun," but it's not, is it? No, we need it to meet expectations. "Well, we had a great time. We made omelettes and crocheted sweaters for ducks." What? No.

We expect that the bachelor or bachelorette will debase themselves in some way, that they will become horribly, abysmally drunk, that the activities will hew to gendered stereotypes (sports games, steaks, poker, whatever it is women do at bachelorette parties), and that feeble gestures of the "so, are you ready to get married?" variety will be made towards the gravity of the situation.

I like traditions as much as the next guy - probably more than the next guy - but I wonder if we think much about their sources. We talk so much about "the last night of freedom" - thus the ubiquity of strip clubs at such things - but when you cast it as the French do it comes with a bit more bite. "Enterrement de vie de garçon/jeune fille;" "the burial of the life as a young man/woman." That's dark, don't you think? I recognize that it's often meant in fun or ironically, but I sometimes find the implication for our view of married life sad. Particularly when we consider the historical disparity between the sex lives of bachelors and the "virtue" demanded of their proper counterparts, thinking of these send offs as eulogies to our boisterous youth reifies unhelpful stereotypes of both sexuality and marriage.

OK. I don't mean to sound like the wet blanket killjoy who doesn't know how to have any fun. I'm not. But for me, traditions are best when the pageantry itself focuses our attention on the import of the moment. (Remember the point I made about the Tibetan moon festival? Like hell you do.) So if what we really want these parties to do is focus attention on what our friends' allegedly won't be able to do any more - which I don't think it is and certainly shouldn't be - then let's stick with the enterrement de vie de garçon. But what if we think of them instead celebrations of the friendship between the groom and his groomsmen (or bride and her bridesmaids) and the coming change in his (or her) life?

As far as our activities, this wouldn't change all that much. We would still go out drinking, to big dinners, to baseball games, etc. - though maybe not to strip clubs... hard to figure out how that would celebrate friendships or marriage... So my point - if I have one - isn't that we need to scrap the whole practice and start from scratch, but basically just to be more critical about what we're doing and why. Traditions are best when the practices they force us to enact serve as reminders to think about or remember something important. Thanksgiving, when done right, surrounds us with family and good food, and reminds us that we are lucky to have them. Dressing up for dinner, doing it more formally than we normally do, adding in the pageantry of preparing standard dishes, all serves as a ritualized reminder that we are lucky to have friends, and food, and family, and ought to give thanks. A bachelor(ette) party can do much the same thing; in fact it inevitably does. I just want us to be clearer on what it turns our minds to.