Economics people like to think at the margin. Yoram Bauman even made a joke out of this - “I’m going to buy an orange, I’m going to buy another orange, I’m going to buy another orange - ”

So do I. Of course, I don’t buy one orange at a time; my margin unit for fruits is usually the mass of it (1/2 kg of oranges is at the margin already) . Ah, but that’s not what I’m going to talk about.

A few days ago, I got an email saying that a department in uni had wanted to get rid of some furniture, including some very comfy chairs. Most people on MSN know that I’ve been complaining about my chair, and my intention to go to OfficeWorks to get a new one. So when such an opportunity arose, why not just go grab a free chair?

So yesterday, a few friends and I went to grab some furniture. There were many (more than 20) identical chairs that were up for grabs. And so we each took 2. I took… 4.

The reasoning is simple - assuming that carrying the chairs back is like a production, carrying two chairs back isn’t marginal. You don’t really incur an extra cost carrying more chairs, but you do lose out on opportunity costs (i.e. more chairs in this case). But with 4 chairs, its at the bottom of of the U curve. Carrying one extra chair would incur an extra cost (in time and effort - the chairs are free anyways).

Here’s a marginal cost curve:

As you can rightly see, the cost of ‘producing’ chairs decreases as the number of chairs ‘produced’ per person approaches 4. ‘Produce’ any more than 4 chairs, and the cost will significantly increase. Okay, perhaps this graph isn’t useful in this case. The MR-MC graph would be more useful… but I’ll talk about that later.

So, there we were, taking our chairs. And we wheeled them out of the building onto the road (yes, they’re very comfortable wheelie chairs, and none of us had a car, so we had to push them all the way back home). All was fine… until we nearly reached the end of the campus grounds. And that’s when thinking at the margin and profit maximizing behaviour gets you into trouble.

The four of us got detained by the campus security. Because they suspected us of stealing chairs. Co-incidentally, none of us had our IDs or wallets with us, and with my bald head, I really look like a bad guy. So, yea, we got detained by them, and subsequently questioned (well, no good-cop bad-cop thing here.. just routine stuff like “why are you taking these chairs off uni grounds”)

So, here’s us, being questioned, and reasoning why we needed to take that many chairs:

Here, I realized I’ve got a problem with authority. I couldn’t stop laughing the whole of last night. Even in front of the security guys. I was trying real hard to stiffle my giggles. My friend had to kick me in the shins to make me stop laughing. I don’t know why, but I did find it very very amusing. And I couldn’t stop taking photos to commemorate this moment. LOL!

But ultimately, though, we got off the hook (but not without a reminder that we should always carry our IDs with us) simply because the giving-away of the chairs were indeed authorized. Its just that doing it at night, and carrying that many chairs at once raised suspicion of theft.

Speaking of thinking at the margin, Aaron has a food-for-thought article on margins.

And also, while on the topic of margins, if you noticed, everyone in the picture above seemed to be wearing a sweater or something. Well, it was 10 celcius last night when we did Grand Theft OfficeChairs. But I’m largely indifferent to the temperature (so is the guy who was sitting on the chair in the white T shirt). My temperature sensitivity, though, I realized, was at the margin at 10 Celcius. When the temperature dropped 1 degree later that night, I started being sensitive to the change in temperature…

But hey, that’s off topic. Or rather, being tangential to the topic of marginal thinking. Right now, I wonder what to do with so many extra chairs… (sell it? Here’s when the MR-MC curve is useful :))

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