Sera Linardi

Thank you.

I am a behavioral economist, an experimental economist.

And so I just do experiments on various questions that I really like practice to research.

So if we have questions from people on the ground, at that time we were thinking about buses in Pittsburgh, where it gets so full and people are like, I can't pick up my kid because I can't get in the bus.

And someone else is just like, I just want to go get a coffee downtown.

It's like,

And we're like, how do we get the parent to get on the bus so they can get their kid and the people who don't really have to get on the bus to like wait for the next bus?

So the idea came from there.

And it's like, can we think of a way?

Because if you ask people, do you need to get on the bus now?

Everyone's like, yes.

It's like, can you think of a way so that the people that don't have to get on the bus won't do it?

And the people by like paying them, like, you know, by like coming up with some way to get people off the line.

That's where it started.

So we found that, yes, like you were saying, so I'm going to answer that question in two parts.

Like once we're in the line, how do we suss out whether we want to continue staying?

And then when we were looking at the line, how do we think about whether we want to stand in line or not?

And it turns out that the two of them are pretty similar, which is that we see, is it long?

Is it moving?

And interestingly, even when we had a clock and we showed people how much time is ahead of them, they still kind of treat these two things as separate.