Emmys host Nate Bargatze tried to use a classic behavioral economics trick to shorten speeches. Instead, the night ended with a negative balance and a lesson in why incentives need to feel real.
I thought about adding a paragraph on the free rider problem, but it was starting to cover too many concepts. This experiment had a lot of good applications, and it's a shame it didn't work out.
Another factor not mentioned is that people in show business are disproportionately narcissists and sociopaths, i.e., not the greatest humans, and they're rich so a few grand is meaningless to them.
Run this experiment at a country fair or a middle school science fair, and I bet you'd get a lot of speeches that would make Calvin Coolidge seem loquacious.
Another consideration is that each individual case of going over time is a small contribution to the overall decrease.
"if I go over by 5 seconds, it only decreases the donation from $100,000 to $95,000."
I thought about adding a paragraph on the free rider problem, but it was starting to cover too many concepts. This experiment had a lot of good applications, and it's a shame it didn't work out.
Another factor not mentioned is that people in show business are disproportionately narcissists and sociopaths, i.e., not the greatest humans, and they're rich so a few grand is meaningless to them.
Run this experiment at a country fair or a middle school science fair, and I bet you'd get a lot of speeches that would make Calvin Coolidge seem loquacious.