Thursday, May 8, 2014

Markets in Everything: Parking Spot Edition

Via Wired:

"The office of San Francisco’s City Attorney is “evaluating” the app, says Gabriel Zitrin, a spokesman for the department. So far, he says, the city has merely determined that the app is “pretty weird.”

It will be intriguing to see if the developers face any legal opposition in the future, as users are exchanging private goods (in the sense of being excludable and rivalrous) purchased in a public realm (thus, we are only discussing public parking lots).

From the article:

"The rub is that your parking spot isn’t really yours. It’s the city’s. Whereas services like Uber and Airbnb help us make use of things that would otherwise go unused — at least in theory — MonkeyParking merely lets one person grab something ahead of another." 

MonkeyParking is certainly an interesting concept as a means to help those willing to pay more for convenience and time saved finding a parking spot, but it may irk some in its nature of transforming public property into a market - especially when the public property is essentially the good in demand itself.

 I am also looking forward to reading about future Coasean solutions to potential holdout problems.

No comments:

Post a Comment