Have you ever pondered public radio fund drives? Whether you’ve supported the station or not (I do), the drive persists; they keep asking for money the whole, dreary week. If you pay on the first day, you get six more days of pitch. If you pay on day 7, you’ve still endured the whole week of no music and no news. If you don’t pay at all, you deserve what you get, but that’s not the point.

And whenever you pay, they’re just going to do the same damn thing in a few more months.

On the historic Roman bridge at Maastricht (my other home town), an old guy plays the accordion, badly. His hat, seeded with a few coins, lies open on the cobblestones at his feet. I’d gladly – as a public service - pay him to stop playing, but would it work? Nope, he’d figure other passersby would also pay him to stop, so he’d start playing again as soon as I’d set foot on the other side of the Maas. Or sooner.

The caissons of the Roman bridge - second bridge in the distance. This less than super photograph is redeemed by the fact that you cannot see or hear the accordionist.

So, the matter seems to embrace no rational incentive structure.

And so it is with public radio. We donors know, at some level, that we’re paying for the many weeks of programming. But at another level, we believe we’re paying them to stop asking for money.

Or rather, so it was with public radio, until today, when our local (San Diego) KPBS announced that its current fund drive would last not a week, but just one day!

I heard this and experienced vertigo, as if I’d followed Alice down the rabbit hole. Did this mean we’d paid them to stop, and they’d actually stopped?! I couldn’t believe my ears.

Public radio is a commons, subject to what Garret Hardin famously called the Tragedy of the Commons (though obviously, if I listen to more radio, that does not mean there’s less radio for you). Alternatively, you could call it an economic “free rider” problem. Thus the inverted incentives.

But it does make sense, in terms of traditional marketing and economic theory¹, that the station may understand that almost everyone who is going to donate is willing to do so in a short time, with sufficient advance notice, and that the station can therefore offer more value to listeners by broadcasting more music and less fund drive. The announcement did say the goal for number of pledges was the same as for a week-long drive.

I hope this drive succeeds. It would show that a non-market mechanism can, at times, make everyone happier.
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¹ Actually, last year’s Nobel Prize in Economics (more properly, the Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel) went to Elinor Ostrom, who showed that small communities with high social cohesion can manage a commons without depleting its resource base.