Do you get annoyed when someone boards the elevator with you only to ride up one floor? The stairs are right there, could they not just walk up a single flight? Well, consider this. Someone boards the elevator on the first floor with a 3rd floor destination, but instead of getting off at floor 2 and walking the last flight of stairs, they ride all the way to 3.
Doesn’t seem as annoying, right? So what explains the difference? It can’t be that you are just appalled at their laziness. Because riding to floor N rather than getting of at N-1 is just as lazy. It must be the externality.
Getting on the elevator only to ride up a single floor delays everybody else. The decision to ride to the second floor rather than the third isn’t the same because whichever he chooses the elevator is going to have to stop once.
Ah, but what if he gets on, floor 2 is already pushed but 3 is not. Then the tradeoff is the same. Because if he were to get off at floor 2 and walk he would spare everyone else the additional stop at 3. So you get annoyed at a single-floor rider you if and only if you get annoyed at this marginal-floor rider.
Well, not quite. Becuase there is one more difference. After he makes the sunk decision to get on the elevator, but before he makes the marginal decision, the problem changes. In particular, as he is riding he gains some new information: he can observe how many other people get on the elevator and are going to be affected by his decision.
This puts the marginal-floor rider in a different position than the single-floor rider in terms of social welfare. Because the single-floor rider’s decision whether to board at all is made without knowing how many other riders will be on the elevator. The marginal-floor rider can condition his decision on the number of riders.
Indeed, this means that you may even have cause to forgive Mr. Single-Floor and yet be annoyed at Ms. Marginal-Floor. He may have reasonably expected that few people, if any, were going to be inconvenienced. But if it turns out that the elevator is nearly full then the sum total of their delay due to Mr. SF’s decision to board is a sunk cost, but it’s an avoidable cost for Ms. MF. If she doesn’t get off at 2 and walk an extra flight, you all have plenty of reason to be annoyed.
This is all very important.
Also, this explains the otherwise inexplicable glass elevators, and raises the puzzle of why we don’t see them in office buildings.
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May 31, 2011 at 11:26 pm
Ben Brockert
The lack of clear-doored elevators in most buildings is for a fairly simple reason: the inside of elevator shafts is ugly. They’re typically unfinished, which would have to change, and they tend to be dirty.
A technological solution would be to have displays on the outside of the elevator doors and a camera on the inside, giving the effect of clear doors. When the car is not present, the door displays can then value-add, either displaying information about the next elevator to arrive, or, more likely, advertisements.
June 1, 2011 at 7:49 am
jeff
Good point, thanks for the comment.
(Sometimes I think I need a glass cheek so that you can see my tongue in it.)
[Sometimes I think I need a less revolting metaphor]
June 1, 2011 at 11:23 am
Tylerh
Actually, glass elevators are nifty topic for a social welfare discussion.
Joel Garreau argued in Edge City that glass elevators where a direct response to women moving into sales & management positions in the 70s. These pioneer women felt safer from the Dominique Strauss-Kahn’s of the world in glass elevators then in an enclosed box, so business hotels quickly learned that glass elevators meant more women professionals (and there colleagues) as customers.
June 2, 2011 at 11:37 am
figleaf
Hat tip to Tylerh for offering a more pragmatic and economically more persuasive reason why building operators install glass elevators.
As for cameras I believe video monitoring has proven to be the economically optimal alternative to the up front cost of installing glass elevators and the ongoing expense of keeping them clean.
If one was genuinely concerned about n-1 elevator-welfare issues one could avoid the cost of glass-elevator retrofits by routing security camera feeds to monitors in elevator lobbies so everyone could watch for moochers getting off on the floor below and walking up.
Note: It’s not a completely impractical question by the way. In the very early days of self-service elevators children often would push the highest floor button they could reach and then walk up the rest of the way to their apartment floor. Although presumably if there were already adults in the car you could run a nice thought experiment on the incremental cost to the adult of agreeing to push an optimal button the child couldn’t reach vs. waiting for them to get off at their sub-optimal-for-them floor.
figleaf
June 1, 2011 at 7:16 am
SG
When comparing MF to SF, you miss out one crucial detail: when the lift doors open and Mr. SF observes the crowd inside, he has the choice to just walk away and take the stairs. His decision at this point is thus equivalent to Ms. MF’s. I wonder how that would be interpreted by the crowd in the elevator though.
June 1, 2011 at 7:29 am
Bryce
But the MF rider imposes his externality on fewer people, since at least one person is getting off before him.
June 1, 2011 at 8:41 am
Ben Brockert
No, I got that. I don’t actually think video ads on every elevator door is a good idea.
June 1, 2011 at 1:37 pm
jeff
🙂
June 1, 2011 at 10:07 am
Assorted links — Marginal Revolution
[…] 6. Who deserves the elevator grudge? […]
June 1, 2011 at 10:19 am
BobbyBolo
Some people can’t walk up a single flight of stairs, because they’re infirm. Nothing annoying about that.
June 1, 2011 at 10:55 am
Justin
I think the solutions that emerge in the ecology of the real world are generally superior to the models of economists. I see two problems with this post.
1. Suppose that floor 2 is pressed and “marginal floor guy” presses 3 and everyone grudges him. Alternately, suppose that marginal floor guy presses 3 first. Then the guy who was going to press 2 should now ride past his floor and then walk one flight. The first person to press a button wins. This creates an incentive to push and shove around the button panel. which is inefficient. Better to accept the cost of marginal floor riders (and not grudge them) than to fight to press the buttons.
2. Marginal floor guy has less information than you suppose. Suppose that five people get on the elevator and one of them presses 2 and the other four riders want to go to three. Then they will try to be polite and get off at 2 and walk. That is not efficient.
Bracketing the point (1), the efficient solution depends on the patterns of elevator usage. Is floor 2 relatively unpopular and floor 3 relatively popular? Then people should feel free to be marginal floor riders. By contrast, the single floor rider who gets on at two will make the elevator stop at an unpopular floor.
June 1, 2011 at 11:14 am
AirmanSpryShark
There’s a technological solution, at least for banks of more than one elevator: rather than have the coarse input of ‘up’ or ‘down’ to request the elevator, replace with individual call buttons for each destination floor. Then the control computer can coordinate which elevator to make available for the new rider. For multiple requests originating at the same floor, the ‘up’ & ‘down’ indicators would also need to be replaced with a list of floors at which that elevator would stop.
It’d be even better if the elevator were sufficiently sensored that the control computer could track how many people got on at which floors; combined with knowing which destinations were desired from which origin floors, it could perform a weighted calculation of total inconvenience, and may select a non-intuitive path (e.g., 5 people get on at floor 1, bound for floor 6; a single rider waiting at floor 2 wants to ride to floor 5; the elevator picks up the floor 2 rider, and delivers the original 5 to floor 6 before returning the individual to floor 5).
June 2, 2011 at 9:23 am
Rob
It’s already being sold and during a recent trip to New Orleans I had the pleasure of using one at my hotel (I think it was a Marriott).
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=6799860
Pareto optimal! No economists were harmed in the design of this elevator.
June 6, 2011 at 7:27 am
Anonymous
I had the displeasure of staying at that Marriott for a month last summer. The elevators there were quite possibly the least efficient in the free world, it was not uncommon for it to take over 10 minutes from arrival at the elevator and arrival in the lobby or vice-versa and riders got to stop at nearly every floor. This seemed independent of hotel occupancy or time of day, leading me to believe that something other than minimizing time for riders was being optimized. Judging from the number of stops, it appeared that they were trying to maximize the number of people carried on each trip (i.e. minimize total trips by the elevators possibly to reduce wear/cost?). This naturally maximized the number of stops and the time spent riding the elevator. Anyway, they ruined what had the potential to be a great idea!
June 1, 2011 at 1:50 pm
Peter
You are also missing many buildings do not allow entrance from the stairwell, i.e. they are exit only. I sadly know this as we have two firms in our building who each have two floors so you regularly getting stopped by one floor riders going both up and down.
June 1, 2011 at 2:10 pm
Carrie
I can walk up flights of stairs, but not down. The best form of elevator policy for efficiency is probably some form of congestion pricing.
June 1, 2011 at 3:23 pm
WillJ
+1 to Jeff for the interesting original post, and +2 to Justin for his reply. 😉
June 1, 2011 at 10:33 pm
zbicyclist
I think marginal elevator riders must own spherical cows.
June 1, 2011 at 10:54 pm
Morning Links – Commented « Arresting Development
[…] Hey economics, is it crazy to hate someone for taking the elevator up just one floor? (Cheap Talk) […]
June 2, 2011 at 9:34 am
Rita
deciding whether and how far to take the elevator is also made more complicated in office buildings that have different companies on different floors and require you to walk through the office to get to the stairs, or separate banks of elevators for say, floors 1-6 and 14; 6-14; and 7-18.
In the building I used to work in I would love to have taken the stairs more, but it was too complicated with some stairs not connecting to other stairs, elevators not connecting to certain floors, and the doors on some floors exit-only.
June 2, 2011 at 9:49 am
David Ellis
1. Riders are already annoyed because you made the elevator stop at your floor when you called it.
2. The superior being (SB) will ride to the top floor and then it’s SBs elevator alone to do with as he pleases.
3. Nothing will change until a per-floor fare is charged.
June 2, 2011 at 2:49 pm
LM
Should MF announce to the elevator crowd as she gets off on floor 2 that she will be walking up to floor 3? Otherwise, they’ll think she’s just another lazy SF.
June 2, 2011 at 3:06 pm
jeff
good point!!!
Next time I’m the lazy SF, I will announce to the crowd how grateful they should be that I only rode for one floor.
June 2, 2011 at 9:39 pm
Elevators « Trinkets Of Frivolous Utility (TOFU)
[…] The welfare economics of elevator travel. […]
June 2, 2011 at 10:03 pm
Welfare Economics Of Elevator Travel — "Do you get annoyed when someone boards the elevator with you only to ride up one floor? The stairs are right there, could they not walk up a single flight?" When to ride, when to walk — and why eco
[…] Source […]
June 3, 2011 at 3:16 am
qcwhfytl
I’ve noticed in a long prolonged time. A very good deal appreciated, I’d likely to need to hold round here extra.
June 7, 2011 at 4:05 am
Adam
The problem here is that I find hotels in particular increasingly don’t let you use the stairs anyway. Stairs are often for emergency use only. I would usually much rather walk than take the elevator for short distances, but I find that often I can’t, and when I have tried, I have been known to set off fire alarms in the process.
June 7, 2011 at 1:38 pm
Michael
The elevator problem is not how to move the maximum number of people in the minimum amount of time but how to move the people within a satisfactory time frame. “Delaying everybody else” only matters if “everybody else” is in a rush; otherwise, the guy who rides one floor doesn’t push the rest of the passengers into dissatisfaction. In economic terms, the externalized cost of people’s decisions is an insufficient explanation of a subjective response to perceived scarcity.
June 7, 2011 at 3:30 pm
paulclarke
Beware of elevators that try just a bit too hard.
http://paulclarke.com/honestlyreal/2010/09/more-lift-fun/
June 8, 2011 at 1:08 pm
Link Loving 08.06.11 « Casper ter Kuile
[…] The welfare economics of elevator travel. Surprisingly interesting. Cheap Talk. […]
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