"The Everyday Economics Part IV, Maximizing Utility through Minimizing Punctuality"

Not that easy, Ferguso

On paper, how tardy a person is should converge to the amount of how tardy he wants to be. In real life, a person's time of arrival may not match the pattern presented above. This difference can be caused by one-off problems, or force majeure, happening on a particular n. Those problems can be caused by factors outside of human control, such as freak weather conditions or falling pianos from the sky, or it can also be caused by factors that to some extent is within human control, such as a broken car.

The common characteristic regarding those factors is that they are exogenous in the equation; although they can change daily, the model can't predict how they change. Such freak occurrences are incorporated in , defined as exogenous residuals to explain the amount of not yet predicted by

Based on the model presented, how late a person comes to a repeating event with an independent schedule is influenced by what time she actually wants to come, how capable she is of going through predictable obstacles, and the unpredictable obstacles falling upon her.

A person may be tardy the first time she participates on a recurring event, yet as she attends the event, again and again, she gets better at overcoming obstacles facing her. However, it doesn't mean that she will come on time in the long term; it is more likely that she will come at the time she desires to arrive.

The takeaway for event organizers seeking to make their audience come on time is that they have to manage expectations. They have to convince that they can reliably deliver utility on time and that their event is worth hurrying to come. If they successfully do that, then there might be a good hope that their participants will come on time.

By Roes Ebara Gikami Lufti | 1706055462 | Staff of Studies Division, Kanopi FEB UI 2018

References (outside hyperlinks):

Sargent, T. Rational Expectations. Retrieved from https://www.econlib.org/library/Enc/RationalExpectations.html