By Soumya Gupta & Avnish Srivastava
Q :
I stay at one of the LSE halls, and we share common kitchens. I prefer buying groceries and storing them in the common fridge. However, many a time I have discovered my items to have been used or aren’t there anymore. Why don’t people buy their own groceries? Is there a solution?
Hungry Rosebury-en
Answer:
Your difficulty is that the property rights here are not secure and your food might end up being treated as a public good (or a semi-public good). In economics, public goods are goods which are non-rival and non-excludable. When you keep things in the fridge, people might use them for their own consumption because at that moment they become non excludable. It becomes very difficult, to find out who used whose food, as there is no mechanism to check and also property rights are not well defined. There also exists another mechanism where people end up consuming your goods. The opportunity cost of going out at night or in the rain is much higher than just using someone else’s milk, which is a small proportion of the entire bottle to make a cup of tea. This might be the case for other goods as well when you need to have breakfast and are running late. I would like to term this into a phenomenon of unclear property rights and conversion of private, excludable goods to semi-public goods.
P.S: Please label your goods and you’ll definitely see an improvement in the situation. The risk of getting caught using someone else’s labelled stuff is much higher that buying your own goods.
Q :
I stay at one of the LSE halls, and we share common kitchens. I prefer buying groceries and storing them in the common fridge. However, many a time I have discovered my items to have been used or aren’t there anymore. Why don’t people buy their own groceries? Is there a solution?
Hungry Rosebury-en
Answer:
Your difficulty is that the property rights here are not secure and your food might end up being treated as a public good (or a semi-public good). In economics, public goods are goods which are non-rival and non-excludable. When you keep things in the fridge, people might use them for their own consumption because at that moment they become non excludable. It becomes very difficult, to find out who used whose food, as there is no mechanism to check and also property rights are not well defined. There also exists another mechanism where people end up consuming your goods. The opportunity cost of going out at night or in the rain is much higher than just using someone else’s milk, which is a small proportion of the entire bottle to make a cup of tea. This might be the case for other goods as well when you need to have breakfast and are running late. I would like to term this into a phenomenon of unclear property rights and conversion of private, excludable goods to semi-public goods.
P.S: Please label your goods and you’ll definitely see an improvement in the situation. The risk of getting caught using someone else’s labelled stuff is much higher that buying your own goods.
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