Three Cheers for Good Policy
Dartmouth Provost David Kotz gets game theory.
In a campus-wide email, Provost Kotz announced that overnight admission to the Dartmouth Health Service Inpatient Department/Infirmary due to intoxication will be free to the student admitted.
This policy is long overdue.
It is in everyone’s best interest for dangerously inebriated students to receive potentially life-saving medical attention without delay: drunkards would prefer not to die, as would their friends, loved ones, family members, and the College itself. Young people senselessly succumbing to respiratory depression would dissuade many parents from sending their children even to a school for which demand is almost perfectly inelastic (perhaps I’m giving my school a little bit too much credit here).
On these grounds, the College wisely grants administrative immunity to those students who do the right thing and Good Sam somebody who has had too much to drink, even if they were responsible for said inebriation. The College does this because it—rightly—cares more about saving lives than adjudicating young people getting drunk.
However, friends would often delay or refrain from making a Good Sam out of financial concern. The hard budget constraint is a wonderful thing most of the time: it forces firms to compete, innovate, and minimize waste. However, when the fear of setting your friend a couple hundred dollars back prevents you from saving his life, something’s gone horribly wrong.
By eliminating the fee for admission to the infirmary, placing a Good Samaritan call is now every non-psychopathic student’s dominant strategy; the socially optimal outcome is achieved.
Hooray!
Moreover, it is doubtful that easing the barrier to entry to receive alcohol-related medical attention will create an undue burden on Dick’s house: Students only Good Sam a friend when he’s really fucked up—pardon my French, but we don’t use breathylyzers to measure friends’ BAC before calling DoSS. Anyway, is it not amusing to read an explicitive written instead of spoken? I think so.