I need an economist

In an interruption to your regular service, a small plea for help.

I've written an article for an upcoming 'The Amateur' column on GameSetWatch, and I need someone with an economics background to sanity check it.

In case you're wondering, I'm an enthusiastic amateur when it comes to economics (which is why Prince Charming revolved around financial arbitrage) but I've never had any conventional training in the subject beyond a 1st year university paper.

The column will be on why it is rational to pay for something even when you can get it for free. As a part of that, I make some statements around why people start companies, for which I've not seen the conventional economic explanation (I've seen plenty for why people continue to run companies, but not why they start them).

Here's the scenario, restated slightly:

Ten people want to have a party, which will cost them a total of $1000. How should they apportion the costs?

The answer appears to be split 10 ways (another to weight it based on the relative pleasure they'll derive from the party).

However, one of them comes up with the idea of selling tickets to the party at $20 dollars each. That way, each person only has to pay $20, instead of a higher amount, and they only have to find another 40 people to pay for the costs.

How many of the ten people does it make sense to start the 'party company' with, which will sell the tickets and pay for the party?

One argument is that all 10 people should join. Because in this instance, they only have to sell one more ticket to be better off then when only 10 people were paying for it.

My questions are: Why should a person choose not to join the party company? What possible benefit do they derive from allowing the party company to make a profit, and how does this relate to why you should pay for something when you can get it for free?

(I've got the answer, I think, and hopefully I've piqued your interest. More importantly, the answer still makes sense even when the number of attendees is known in advance).

What is wrong with fun?

In case you missed it, my latest The Amateur column is up on GameSetWatch, suggesting as gamers that we perhaps worry about whether games should be taken seriously too much. And a creepy clown picture...

And because I mentioned the words Artificial Intelligence, the content hoovers of aigamedev.net sucked it up and spat it out as a part of their weekly article summary. Their summary makes me sound very irregular...

The Amateur: WYSIWYG Game Design

My latest column for GameSetWatch is up featuring WYSIWYG Game Design. It's not as strong as the other columns I've written for them - but still has some interesting ideas that I wanted to explore. It may have some strange relevance for other activities occurring on this site at the moment.

The Amateur: Angband & The Game Development Arms Race

My latest column for GameSetWatch has just been put online. It's a little more 'Angbandy' than I would normally write for them. Have a read and let me know what you think.

In related news, it looks like Thomas Biskup, the author of ADOM, may be releasing his next roguelike in 2008. Because we need more competition.