As I noted in this post earlier this week, when the price of a good or service is below the equilibrium price, then the quantity of the good or service demanded will exceed the quantity of the good or service supplied, and there will be a shortage. But what if the usual price of the good or service is zero? In that case, there is often a shortage. An example I use in my classes is the 'market' for kidneys for human transplant. I put 'market' in inverted commas because in most countries there is no market. You can't buy or sell kidneys for transplant. This is effectively the same as mandating a zero price for kidneys. The result is a predictable shortage of kidneys for transplant, that kills over 40,000 people per year in the US alone. Fortunately, not all goods or services with a zero price have such fatal consequences.
As I noted in the earlier post, when there is a shortage, we should expect the price of the good or service to increase. That is unless, like the 'market' for donor kidneys, the price is mandated to be zero. For some markets that start with a zero price though, a shortage can be the impetus to introduce a new (non-zero) market price. As an example, take the market for dungeon masters, as reported in this article published on Hell Gate last week:
Playing the role of Dungeon Master can be a rewarding job but it is sometimes thankless, and always taxing. D&D can be overwhelming to any new player; this is especially true for a DM, who needs to know all the rules, adjudicate them, create or manage the story, plan logistics for their group, and cater the experience to what each player wants. The amount of effort involved makes it inaccessible for new players and difficult for experienced ones to sustain long-term.
All of which has conspired to make it harder to find people to actually run the spiking number of campaigns. "I think a lot of DMs just want to sit back and let other people run a game," one Dungeon Master on hiatus from running campaigns told me...
The shortage has made it difficult for many players to find games, especially ones that are high quality and in-person. On websites like Lex and Reddit, posts of players in the city looking for DMs outnumber the opposite significantly, with the latter consistently getting more traction. For Hex&Co.'s program alone, there are nine hundred on the email recruiting list to join one of their organized campaigns...
One solution that has emerged to this problem are players paying for a professional DM. In New York City, some of these DMs are functionally gig workers, contracting with a service like Hex&Co.'s where players pay the store $90 per month for four sessions, and the proceeds are split between the store and DM...
Some have managed to make a full career out of organizing bespoke games for a significantly higher fee. Charging upwards of $100 per hour, they'll create campaigns for a group of players tailored to their interests, experience levels and playing styles, providing a suite of game terrains and miniatures they'll tote to players' homes.
The new market 'price' for a dungeon master (DM) will likely raise the number of amateur DMs taking on paid gigs, reducing the shortage. However, are there likely to be some unintended consequences of this?
Uri Gneezy and Aldo Rustichini ran a famous experiment in Israeli day-care centres (described in Gneezy's book co-authored with John List, The Why Axis, which I reviewed here) where day-care centres began fining parents who showed up late to pick up their children. In theory, the higher price of a late pickup (because of the fine) should have induced fewer late pick-ups. However, this new system replaced the existing norm of picking up children on time, and actually resulted in more late pick-ups.
In the context of DMs, the previous norm was that DMs were unpaid, creating and running campaigns or gaming sessions for the love of the game. Some DMs would spent countless unpaid hours developing their game world, dungeons, main antagonists, and so on. What happens when the norm of those unpaid hours (and the labour of love they were associated with) become unpaid development time for paid gaming sessions? Perhaps would-be paid DMs put more time into development, leading to higher quality gaming sessions (the last paragraph quoted above suggests that). On the other hand, perhaps DMs would reduce their efforts, if they perceive the 'new' market price as unworthy of significant preparation time.
I guess we will have to see how this all plays out.
[HT: Marginal Revolution]
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