K-Ville Bills: One Student’s Plan to Better Tenting

Tenting season has come to a close. Brave students organized themselves into groups of 12, bought their brand-name tents and raided their local REI for the warmest sleeping bags, gloves and thermal underwear in stock.

For these tenters, whom we often forget are college students midway through an academic semester, dripping noses and the possibility of sickness may not be the primary worry. Rather, they are often more concerned with their ability to juggle tenting duties with problem sets, exams, meetings and work—all while maintaining a decent social life.

But even with these obstacles, these tenters did made the rational choice to tent, and, as economists will tell you, any complex decision requires a trade-off. In return for being a witness to two hours of basketball bliss, these fans know they must subject themselves to many hours of severe discomfort and unsuccessful attempts to study on a sidewalk shared with hundreds of others.

These students performed their own cost-benefit analysis weighing the pros and cons of the experience and finally decided, to the shock of their parents, friends and the rest of humanity, to set up a makeshift home in the cold, unforgiving conditions of Krzyzewskiville with their heated, tuition-included dormitory rooms mere minutes away. Jeffrey Sachs would be disgusted by such a blatant disrespect of adequate shelter.

“I think maybe [tenting is] a little over the top. Obviously we all love basketball, but maybe we put too much emphasis on it,” said senior Charles Keilin, ironically also a member of Tent No. 1. “The fact that people stay out for a month for the February game or two months for the March game is a little excessive.”

To some, the decision is unreasonable. To others, it’s justified. Nonetheless, students often wonder—does this process have to be so unforgiving? Is there is a way for a student to tent without having to give up so much? Perhaps Jane Doe doesn’t have to sleep in the tent in the nights leading up to her big EGR 53 midterm. Maybe John Smith does not have to miss a fraternity rush event. Although they can ask their tent mates, negotiating with 11 others is far less likely to produce a favorable outcome than negotiating with, well, the entire student body.

The Temporary Tenter

More pressing issues include faults within the market itself. For starters, the supply of temporary tenters is limited by certain external qualities. Though line monitors rarely check the person behind the DukeCard, as plenty of K-Ville alumni can attest, it may be prudent to pick somebody with similar physical qualities (gender, skin and hair color) to be safe. The risk of a more thorough examination of nose shapes and facial symmetry seems minimal and thus insignificant.

This problem is compounded by another. Lacking significant information, tenters would not have access to the entirety of the student body, instead constrained to the services of friends, friends of friends, acquaintances or look-a-likes they spot across the Great Hall.

Show Me the Money!

Then there is the issue of financial compensation. If true altruism does not exist—certainly a big if—then any rational temporary tenter would demand some form of reimbursement for his time in K-Ville. This reimbursement could take many forms, such as the unspoken reinforcement of an existing friendship, the introductory stages of a future friendship or just cash payment. Since it would be hard to quantify friendship, let’s focus on the cash.

To be clear, this suggests the creation of a market where tenters who value a certain amount of time highly—be it due to a conflicting exam or social event—can “buy” this time from students who value it less: “temporary replacements.” The generation of such a market would increase economic efficiency in a similar manner to the emissions trading market created by the Kyoto Treaty, in which emission-dependent countries are able to buy “pollution rights” from less emission-dependent countries.

Philip Cook, a professor of public policy and economics, saw value in the idea. He wrote in an e-mail that in such a market “tickets to the student section [would] be rationed not just by time in line, but rather a choice between time in line or cash or some combination. Incidentally, the result would be to make tenting more attractive, and hence would increase the number of people who wanted to join in.”

There are plenty of ways to calculate the amount tenters must pay temporary replacements to spare one hour of their time. Perhaps the most practical method is to ask the tenter, in this scenario the employer.

“On an average day, when it’s not freezing and not the 1-2 a.m. shift, then maybe I’d give somewhere in the range of five to ten dollars per hour,” said sophomore Kathryn Latham, member of Tent No. 51.

Or you could inquire as to how much other students have been paid to perform similar services.

“I personally know somebody who has been paid twenty bucks to sleep outside [for the night],” said sophomore Rebecca Kahn.

Another method, widely popular among economists, is to use the market wage. That is, pay temporary tenters the “opportunity cost” of their services—the money they forgo if they instead used the same time to seek employment elsewhere on campus. As wages of other readily available student jobs on campus range from $10 to $12 per hour, this would be the wage of temporary replacements.

Perhaps the most interesting method, though, is to set the marginal wage equal to the marginal product of labor. In this scenario, labor refers to the act of tenting in somebody else’s place. This process of wage determination demands that the tenter pay his temporary replacement based on the additional monetary value their services render towards the final good—a wristband for the Duke-UNC game.

To calculate this marginal product, we first must know the intrinsic value of being present at the matchup. A recent query on the second-hand ticket market website stubhub.com revealed that individual tickets to the game are being sold for between $768 to $2,500. We can determine the value of attending the big game to be $1,234—the average. This is referred to as the “revealed preference” method of valuation, which relies keenly on the existing purchasing habits of consumers. This assumes that all seats within Cameron are equal—even though a seat in the rafters might lack the uncomfortably crowded, exhausting, body-heat exchange that occurs in the Cameron Crazies’ section

Once we have this value, our next step is to compute the total hours an individual must wait in K-Ville in order to fulfill the tenting requirements. This was the difficult aspect of the analysis, as the tenting process is divided into “night” and “day” shifts, with requirements changing between them. To make matters worse, the times of these shifts change throughout the week, pushing night shifts later into night and even early into the next morning on the weekends to allow tenters to spend their Friday and Saturday nights more productively.

I chose to complete the calculations using a 12-person tent that began at noon on Saturday, Jan. 15, 2011—the official start of blue tenting. The tent that I chose would therefore undergo 13.5 days of blue tenting, followed by seven days of white tenting and two nights of personal checks.

The total time spent on daytime shifts would be 334.5 hours, and the cumulative duration of nighttime shifts would be 154.5 hours. The personal checks require a tenter to be in K-Ville for three of five spot checks during a 22-hour span. Assuming that each tenter carries an equal burden of responsibility and personal checks are evenly spread, this means that an individual will be responsible for 27.88 daytime hours, 61.75 nighttime hours and 13.2 hours during personal checks.

We must also account for periods of grace, however, which are given during bad weather, all men’s basketball games and most women’s basketball games. There are 14 such games before Feb. 9, each lasting approximately two hours. Grace extends one hour past away games and two hours past home games. Therefore, each tent will be given 48 hours of grace to be equally distributed among its members. Weather patterns are infinitely harder to predict.

Per these calculations, a tenter will spend a grand total of 98.83 hours in Krzyzewskiville in order to obtain a good worth $1,234. Therefore, each hour of this “labor” is worth $12.48—its value of marginal product. If we set marginal product equal to marginal wage, this too will be the amount paid to temporary tenters. Inevitably, some will argue that nighttime hours should be worth less than daytime hours. Others might claim the opposite. In accordance with the “Goldilocks Principle,” I set them equal.

Economically speaking, the most pressing limitation of these figures is that the duration of tenting and value of the game vary greatly every year based on the game’s timing and the teams’ respective strength.

A Duke Divided

Changes to traditions generally will not come easily. Many students would inevitably resist the implementation of this system as a reduction of the “public spirit” surrounding tenting. As these classic Duke fans see it, taking advantage of others’ willingness to bear tenting duties for profit would pervert a tradition that makes Duke so special. It wouldn’t be the first time critics have opposed, or bluntly denied, the harsh realities of standard economics, and it certainly won’t be the last.

Although my system would certainly change K-Ville, it would not devalue the tradition like, say, allocating an equal number of tickets to students would. Rather, this idea strongly respects the institution and seeks to maintain the certain customs of personal sacrifice that set Duke students apart from other college basketball fans across the nation.

Still, such anxieties of a cultural change are valid. Allowing students to offer their tenting services would change the tradition and aura of Krzyzewskiville—but for better or worse?

“Anytime you increase the choice set, that is going to be helpful,” said Professor of Economics Peter Arcidiacono. “Now instead of just ‘wait in line or not,’ there is this third option that could only be beneficial to the individual.”

For more tangible reasons, some tenters will continue to disagree, opposing predicted economic injustices inherent in the market system. They will raise concerns of inequality, stating that wealthier students would unevenly benefit from such a system, complimenting their existing advantages in animal-logoed clothing.

“If people don’t have the money, then they feel like they can’t get into the game,” Khan said. “I don’t think you should turn K-Ville into a business.”

A more valid opposing argument, however, might explore the “negative externality” suffered by those who wait, suggesting that they may be less likely to enjoy the game if they knew students in front of them had merely paid for their tickets.

Ultimately the economic fate of K-Ville will be determined by its inhabitants. Whether students choose to invest their time or their money, tenters are capable of taking matters into their own hands. After all, that is what student Kimberly Reed did when she invented the process of tenting, twenty-five years ago.