You will never find a $100 bill on the floor of Grand Central Station at rush hour, because someone would have picked it up already.
Are you really less likely to find $100 in Grand Central Station than finding $100 anywhere else? It’s true that there are many more people who could find it before you, but there are also many more people that could drop $100. If you imagine a 1D version, where everyone walks through either Grand Central Station or a quiet alley along the same line, one after the other, then it seems like you should be equally likely to find $100 in either case – if the person in front of you in the line drops $100.
Agree. Also, the one time I found a 50€ bill on the ground it was at a busy train station, so my guess is the evidence actually goes the other way around (you have many people coming through, all of whom are paying uniquely little attention to their surroundings, and so the aggregate likelihood of someone dropping a $100 bill and no one noticing before you do, is higher).
There’s probably more “bill-spotting effort per occupant” in grand central than elsewhere in life. Like maybe at a random train station there is on average $10/day available for the world to make watching the ground for abandoned cash, while at Grand Central there is $300/day. It is worth ~nobody’s time to just sit around looking for bills in the random case, but in the grand central case maybe there is a kid who decides to try. If a bill drops within 20 meters of that kid, they are pretty likely (say > 30%) to notice it before anyone else does — just being the nearest person to the dropper isnt’ good enough.
(If this is a claim about “market efficiency”, then I’d say something like “the largest markets attract the most sophisticated participants”.)
John Wentworth says:
Are you really less likely to find $100 in Grand Central Station than finding $100 anywhere else? It’s true that there are many more people who could find it before you, but there are also many more people that could drop $100. If you imagine a 1D version, where everyone walks through either Grand Central Station or a quiet alley along the same line, one after the other, then it seems like you should be equally likely to find $100 in either case – if the person in front of you in the line drops $100.
Agree. Also, the one time I found a 50€ bill on the ground it was at a busy train station, so my guess is the evidence actually goes the other way around (you have many people coming through, all of whom are paying uniquely little attention to their surroundings, and so the aggregate likelihood of someone dropping a $100 bill and no one noticing before you do, is higher).
In this scenario, are you not also also paying uniquely little attention to your surroundings (and thus equally less likely to spot the bill)?
It feels a little like begging the question to apply that modifier to other people in the scenario, but not yourself.
Yeah I think the only thing that really matters is the frequency with which bills are dropped, and train stations seem like high-frequency places.
There’s probably more “bill-spotting effort per occupant” in grand central than elsewhere in life. Like maybe at a random train station there is on average $10/day available for the world to make watching the ground for abandoned cash, while at Grand Central there is $300/day. It is worth ~nobody’s time to just sit around looking for bills in the random case, but in the grand central case maybe there is a kid who decides to try. If a bill drops within 20 meters of that kid, they are pretty likely (say > 30%) to notice it before anyone else does — just being the nearest person to the dropper isnt’ good enough.
(If this is a claim about “market efficiency”, then I’d say something like “the largest markets attract the most sophisticated participants”.)