Adam Chandler investigated the fate of coins that are thrown into fountains:

• Usually money thrown into fountains in American parks are donated to the very charities that run the park – in effect the parks keep it for themselves.
• There’s often very little change left for maintenance workers to collect however; entrepreneurial citizens frequently go into the fountain and collect the money before park staff can get at it.
• The Mall of America has a private fountain and the approximately $24,000 it collects is used to fund a grant that charities apply to use.
• And then there’s the Trevi Fountain in Rome. Due to a tradition that was popularized in the movie “Three Coins in the Fountain” thousands of dollars are thrown into the fountain by people around the world every day.
• Some enterprising citizens used to try to collect the money through the use of a magnetizing wand. But the shift to Euro coins – which are immune to them – foiled this plan.
• Italy uses money from the fountain to fund a supermarket for the poor.

Read more here.

Source: The Atlantic

Polly Mosendz wrote about the staggering amounts that people are shelling out for bachelor parties:

• Elite Wall Street types hire planners that charge around $5,000 – or 10% of the total cost of the party – to plan the event.
• The most expensive ones can cost as much as $10,000 a person and involve international trips to global party destinations.
• While those are extremes, the averages are still pretty high. One survey found that groomsmen spend $680 for their friend’s bachelor party, while bridesmaids squeak by on just $437 for bachelorette parties.
• The best man, meanwhile, shells out around $1,000, while the maid of honour is in for $550.
• Things even out by the time the wedding rolls around – women spend more money on things like wedding dresses than men.

Read other details here.

Source: Bloomberg

Gabriele Parussini wrote about a creative strategy to get people to cough up tax money:

• One municipal commissioner in India’s financial capital, Mumbai, has started sending drummers that publicly sing and ask individuals, who are delinquent on their taxes, to pay up.
• This is a desperate problem in a country where only 3% of the people pay taxes making it difficult to invest in things like infrastructure and education.
• Since the strategy was implemented tax revenues in the suburb have risen by 20%.
• It didn’t all come as a direct result of the drummers. Some saw it happen to people they know and they preemptively paid their taxes in order to avoid the drummers.
• Some worry that over time, as people get used to seeing the drummers, the drummers will lose their effectiveness.
• Which is why the person who came up with the strategy is planning to escalate and use dancing transgendered women – known as hijras in India – once it seems like the drums are no longer effective.

Read more here.

Source: The Wall Street Journal

Via: Marginal Revolution

Ice cream trucks are battling it out on the streets of New York, write Andy newman and Emily S. Rueb:

• New York’s streets have never been for faint-hearted ice cream sellers. In the 60s an ice cream truck driver was kidnapped and had his truck blown up by competitors.
• In 2004 a couple selling ice cream cones were beaten with a wrench.
• Today the battle rages on between two popular chains: Mister Softee and New York Ice Cream (NYIC).
• NYIC believes that midtown New York is its turf, and if a Mister Softee truck is seen on those streets, trucks will be ordered to surrounded the Softee truck, blocking it from making sales.
• Meanwhile Softee drivers have claimed turf around the Upper East Side and East Harlem and carry bats in their vans in case a competitor dares to hawk its wares.
• Like all iconic war stories, the warring parties were allies once – indeed, NYIC trucks actually used to be Mister Softee trucks, but rather than pay Mister Softee high licensing fees, the owner of NYIC repainted a bunch of trucks and started his own chain.

Read more here.

Source: The New York Times

In light of the most recent shooting in the US, Michael S. Rosenwald’s article on an app that could, perhaps, help reduce the number of such incidents seems fitting:

• Some feel that in order to reduce the number of mass shootings, it’s important to stop turning the individuals behind it into (in)famous celebrities
• The Brady Campaign has launched a browser plug-in that replaces the names and pictures of mass violence perpetrators with the names and pictures of victims.
• There is some evidence that mass shootings spread like a virus – after disturbed individuals see a prominent example they may be more likely to then plan their own.
• On the flip side though, defenders of naming shooters point out that this helps inform the debate and could inspire research into the risk factors that lead to individuals committing atrocities.

Read more about the effort here.

Source: The Washington Post

The BBC reports that soon patients could be haggling with ambulance drivers over the meter:

• Ambulance drivers in Beijing decide how much to charge patients for their services. As the process is opaque this has led to complaints about overcharging.
• To deal with this, ambulances in Beijing will be installing taxi style meters for transparent fare calculations.
• The meter will record $7.50 for a 3km trip, and an additional $1 for every kilometer thereafter.
• Users have pointed out that this could lead to an unfortunate situation, where an ambulance takes a passenger in critical condition on a longer route to the hospital, to maximize earnings.

Centives has previously covered how Russians use ambulances as personal taxis, and the sports car ambulance that Dubai is considering.

Read more about Beijing’s ambulance meters here.

Source: BBC

Via: Marginal Revolution

Progress means different things for different countries writes The Economist:

• It’s been 14 years since Sierra Leone last had a traffic light.
• During the country’s civil war, the old ones were torn down and sold for scrap.
• Now, under direct orders from the President, one has been built at a busy cross-roads.
• It is, of course, entirely ignored by a population that has never had to abide by one before.
• The few times it even works that is. It seems to perpetually blink the amber bulb.
• And while the government promises to build more it’s possible that this one was only built as a one-off in order to appease the populace just before elections.

Read more here.

Source: The Economist

As Americans return from Memorial day barbequeus they’ll likely be wincing at Uber’s surge pricing. Keith Chen, head of economic research at Uber, spoke with NPR about some of the intriguing things he’s found in an analysis of Uber’s surge pricing data:

• Passengers are more likely to agree to Uber’s surge pricing, if the amount of surge is 2.1, rather than 2.0.
• The reason is because when it’s 2.1 passengers think that there’s a complicated algorithm deciding the amount of surge. When it’s 2.0 it looks like Uber is just doubling prices and may not have put a lot of thought behind it.
• Passengers are also more likely to accept surge pricing if their phones are low on battery – probably because they don’t want to risk waiting and trying again in 15 minutes to see if surge pricing disappears.
• One way for Uber to assuage passenger anger about surge pricing would to be boost the base fare, and instead of adding a surge during busy periods, offering a discount during non-busy periods.
• But while this may help placate passengers, drivers would probably then become angry at the idea of driving for a discount during non-busy periods.

The full podcast is interesting. You can hear it here.

Source: NPR

Via: Quartz

Hamilton is a Broadway show that has become the next big thing. Michael Sokolove looked at the economics of that kind of success:

• Usually Broadway shows aren’t that great an investment. But when you have a hit like Hamilton there are few returns of investments so appealing.
• After you pay the initial upfront costs the show can run for decades, and in multiple locations.
• All in all investors put in $12.5 million for the show. It is soon expected to make $1 billion in profit in New York alone.
• In fact the show earns half a million dollars in profit every single week.
• And $82 million worth of tickets for future shows – the equivalent of 400 sold out shows – have been sold.
• The producers of the show could easily make more money. While they sell tickets for between $67 and $477, scalpers go onto sell the tickets for up to $2,000.

Read more here.

Source: The New York Times

Via: Marginal Revolution