FT.com
By Tim Harford
A study shows most people would have paid their share of the
bill, given the choice. And yet in social settings, splitting remains the
default option
©Raymond Biesinger
The difficulties involved in splitting a restaurant bill are the
stuff of legend or, at least, the stuff of Life, the Universe and
Everything by Douglas Adams. Adams introduced the concept of
Bistromathics and the Bistromathic Drive: the mathematics generated by people’s
odd behaviour in restaurants is apparently so powerful and strange, he
declared, that it can fling a starship across a galaxy in seconds.
Bistromathics emerge from the
interaction of two powerful forces in social science: freeriding and social
pressure. Eating out is a social occasion and your behaviour will affect how
others see you. Yet the opportunity for freeriding is obvious: if six diners
split the bill equally, the additional cost to any one diner of ordering that
£12 starter will be just £2, with his companions picking up the balance. The
split-the-bill rule offers an excellent opportunity to try the fancier options
at little extra cost. Of course everyone else is likely to reach the same
conclusion – but then they’d be a fool to do otherwise.
Do people really freeride in this way?
A large number of laboratory experiments, typically involving students sitting
at computers and interacting anonymously, have found that we freeride less than
textbook economic theory would predict. We care about other people, it seems –
either about their wellbeing or what they think of us.
But there’s an alternative explanation
for this curious outbreak of human decency: perhaps people are just confused by
the laboratory setting and the laboratory games. There’s some evidence, for
instance, that people in these free-rider games start to take advantage of each
other after a few practice runs.
In 2004, three researchers, Uri Gneezy,
Ernan Haruvy and Hadas Yafe published an intriguing study in The Economic
Journal. Gneezy and his colleagues had conducted an experiment in a real
restaurant, in Haifa, Israel, inviting groups of six diners to order food – but
giving them different systems for settling the bill.
The idea wasn’t to simulate the real
restaurant experience, when one dines with friends and can expect social
consequences for good or bad behaviour: the researchers had invited complete
strangers to eat together, ostensibly for the purposes of researching the
effect of food on emotions.
What was the point of creating such an
odd dining experience? Instead of trying to understand how people behave in
restaurants, the researchers were trying to use the restaurant as a better kind
of laboratory. Laboratories can be confusing, but everybody understands that if
you’re sitting in a restaurant and you’ll be splitting the bill, you have an
incentive to order the lobster.
Diners were, at random, offered three
different billing rules: split-the-bill, pay-your-share, or on-the-house. They
were also asked to order food by writing their choices down, without
discussion. This odd request was made less odd by the fact that they were all
filling in questionnaires at the time.
Homo economicus immediately emerged:
diners ordered, on average, 37 shekels worth of food when paying their own way,
51 shekels when splitting the bill, and 82 shekels when the experimenter picked
up the tab for everyone. (A small follow-up experiment hinted that people
splitting the bill six ways behave similarly to those paying one-sixth of their
own bill.)
We freeride in restaurants, then – at
least, we freeride in the odd circumstance of having lunch with total strangers
and filling in questionnaires. But there’s a twist to this: the experimenters
asked, out of curiosity, whether people would prefer to split the bill or pay
their share. Most people would have paid their share, given the choice. And yet
in social settings, splitting the bill remains the default option. Is there a
deeper or more fascinating subject than Bistromathics?
Tim Harford’s new book, “The Undercover
Economist Strikes Back”, is published by Little, Brown
No comments:
Post a Comment