How to make economists fight like ferrets in a sack

One of the funniest passages of writing I have read in the past few years appears within the pages of Richard Thaler’s memoir Misbehaving. He describes what happens when the University of Chicago economics faculty moves to a new location. The economists simply have to agree among themselves who will occupy each office in the new building. Now in theory, at any rate, this should be a breeze. You have a group of people who should be among the most rational in the world; their discipline, economics, defines itself as dedicated to the study of the ‘allocation of resources under conditions of scarcity’: here is a problem tailor-made for economists to solve.

It was, as you can imagine, a fiasco. The offices vary slightly in size and in prestige (Americans have a peculiar fetish for corner offices). Almost immediately someone proposes holding an auction. But the idea is rejected, since it was deemed unseemly for elderly Nobel laureates to be allocated smaller offices than younger colleagues with lucrative consulting practices. The whole matter becomes embroiled in political infighting, backbiting, reputational neurosis and obsession with tiny distinctions between the offices. People would even surreptitiously appear at the new building carrying measuring tape. As Thaler later remarks, the whole feud was rather pointless anyway, since every room was perfectly adequate. Moreover, those who ended up with offices on the worse side of the building had the compensation of a view of the Robie House, a fabulous prairie-style building by Frank Lloyd Wright.

One cunning solution to this problem is to create a ballot which allows people to choose their rooms in order. If you draw number one, you get the first choice of room; if you draw last you choose last.