Freakonomics.

Freakonomics is now a movie. I read the book and thought it interesting. O and J saw the movie when it premiered at the Tribeca Film Festival in the spring and highly recommended it. When H asked if anyone wanted to attend a screening of the movie with a Q&A session with Steven Levitt to follow, I immediately signed up.

The screening was interesting. The movie was akin to a documentary and generally well-done. There was one vignette on cheating in sumo wrestling that was too long for my attention span. Or maybe it was that I was sitting too close and reading all the subtitles made me nauseaus. Hard to tell. Otherwise, lots of documentary-dramatizations of topics in the book. And, while I didn't stay for the entire Q&A portion of the screening, there were a lot of thoughtful and only marginally pretentious questions asked, fairly amazing given that most of the audience were U of C students.

And, because it was a University of Chicago production with a well-known economist involved, they couldn't restrain themselves from an experiment. They turned attending the screening into a pay-what-you-want experiment. You had to pay something more than .99 but there was no limit otherwise. Levitt announced that the average turned out to be $8.60. I think that really means $10 or $15 with a few strong outliers, including the two people who paid $100 to attend. He said that in previous experiments there was an option to pay a penny and a full twenty five percent of the people took that option. Unsurprisingly, they were also the people least likely to actually attend the screening.

Economics in action.