If I pay for a plane ticket, and get a seat that reclines, then I’ve paid for the ability to recline, and that means that I’m reclining. If that creates problems for other passengers, they should address that complaint to the airline, because that’s what the problem is: a conflict between the passenger (who wishes to not be inconvenienced by the reclinability of others’ seats) and the airline (which chooses not to provide enough room between the seats, or otherwise design the seating, such that this problem wouldn’t happen).
I as another customer have no responsibility to ensure that your customer experience is satisfactory (so long as I am not breaking either any applicable laws, or the airline’s terms of use / equivalent). The airline has that responsibility. If they shirk it, that’s on them—not on me.
Blaming other passengers for the fact that your service is unsatisfactory is simply displacement of one’s own sense of powerlessness as a customer.
Far more honest to admit that you are powerless—that you are getting far less of the surplus value of the transaction than you could be, and that you can do nothing to affect this.
One customer has no responsibility to ensure another customer’s experience is satisfactory. One could also point out that a customer (traditionally) has no responsibility to ensure that the staff are satisfied.
But I would say that one human being should consider how their actions might impact on other human beings—even if they happen to the customer. If I am in a restaurant it is possible for me to notice that my loud speaking is annoying to another person and tone it down. By all means recline your seat, I don’t care. But please don’t adopt the general policy that when you are the customer you can suddenly stop thinking about how your actions might effect others.
This is all very well as a general heuristic, and certainly being considerate of other people is a good thing.
But when we find ourselves in a situation where we have paid for some good or service, but then, having done so, are informed that if we actually gain possession of the good / enjoy the service—which we have already paid for!—then we’re bad people… then we should immediately be very suspicious. Because what this indicates, quite reliably, is that this is a situation which has either been deliberately engineered, or deliberately prevented from being resolved, by parties that benefit from this outcome—most obviously, of course, that would be the provider of the good/service, which certainly very much prefers to receive money, but provide nothing.
And so it is in this case. The airline benefits from this situation, as I have noted above. This entire problem could be fixed! It doesn’t have to exist at all. But it does, and the reason why it continues to exist is, in large part, the public perception of it as a moral problem, rather than an economic problem.
And so the bottom line is this: when we are told that reclining our seat on an airplane possibly makes us bad people, we are being cheated out of something that we paid for. The beneficiaries of this fraud are the airlines. And the people who make the moral claim are the airlines’ accomplices.
I, for one, do not care to comply with a moral demand, made by accomplices to a fraud of which I am the victim, that calls for me to participate in my own defrauding. Such a demand calls not for acquiescence, but for spite. Reclining one’s seat and thereby inconveniencing someone who believes that reclining makes you a bad person, is not only not morally blameworthy—on the contrary, it is a positive good. You are thereby doing your part to punish defectors (a prosocial act, without question), and helping to move society toward a state where everyone agrees that reclining a reclinable airplane seat is your right. That is, it seems clear to me, a good thing.
If it is common knowledge that you will be socially punished for reclining, you are no longer being deceived when you buy the seat. The deception only takes place if you buy the seat thinking there will be no social punishment but actually there is.
I am not buying “freedom from social punishment”, I am buying “the airline provides me the benefit they advertise”. If they allow this “social punishment” to deprive me of that benefit, then now it’s not “social punishment” anymore, but action by the airline.
And if the “social punishment” does not in fact prevent me from reclining, then what you wrote is just irrelevant.
Many airlines offer extra legroom seats for a few extra dollars. It’s informative that despite how much people complain about airline seats, very few are willing to pay 10 dollars extra to avoid the issue. Airlines listen to people’s wallets, not their mouths.
In my experience, paying for the extra seat room often gives you a seat that doesn’t actually have more legroom, or actually have less (!!) legroom. when the payment is so disconnected from the actual experience, it becomes useless as a signal.
Exactly. The worst transatlantic flight I ever had was one where I paid for “extra legroom”. turns out it was a seat without a seat in front, i.e., the hallway got broader there.
However, other passengers and even the flight attendants certainly didn’t act like this extra legroom belonged to me. Someone even stepped on my foot! On top of that I had to use an extremely flimsy table that folded out of the armrest.
Since most of us aren’t weekly business flyers, this is a far cry from a free market.
This is related to something I’ve often pointed out: the reason why airline customers won’t pay money for better service or amenities is that prices are hard to hide, and quality of service is easy to hide.
I don’t think it’s possible to hide seat width or legroom once on the plane. Or even on a spec sheet, since airplane seats aren’t just randomly bolted wherever based on gut feel. The real issue is duplicity in the sales process as Vitor mentioned.
Case in point many airlines such as Air Canada are getting rid of several rows of economy seats on all their wide-body planes for premium economy seating, where the difference is large enough to be noticeable by everyone. And Air Canada is pretty sizeable so if 15% of their customers are willing to pay for it, and assuming half are private travellers and half are businesses downgrading from business class, then that suggests there’s sold demand among roughly 7.5% of their customer base. This suggests the vast majority of the remainder only complain in words not via their wallets.
I don’t think it’s possible to hide seat width or legroom once on the plane.
I think it is, and the post I was replying to showed an example of that. Sure, if you personally experience “the extra legroom was only because of space that the crew and passengers were encouraged not to treat as mine”, you know about it. But it’s certainly not mentioned if you go to the airline’s web site and get told that the seat has extra legroom. Any airline policies about how the crew is permitted to use the room, and how the crew should let passengers walk into it, won’t be advertised, or even written down. And it’s impractical for consumers to coordinate enough that an airline policy of treating their extra legroom seats this way becomes widely known.
Well the extra legroom wasn’t hidden in Vitor’s example, it just wasn’t as much as the full aisle, since the full aisle is not meant for the exclusive use of the passengers behind it even though the pictures and maybe even the wording would suggest that, especially for those unaware of legal requirements or airline policy. But that’s standard practice on every airline as far as I know. Once someone has experienced that once there’s no need to coordinate anything because it’s not like any airline in the future will actually give over an aisle for exclusive use as legroom.
It was hidden in the sense “finding out about it ahead of time when comparing airlines would be very difficult”. No airline’s web site is going to say “$X for extra legroom, but the plane is set up so that people will walk over it”.
Presumably everyone making ticket purchasing decisions has some form of long term memory and can remember the concept of non-exclusive aisle space. So anyone who’s experienced this once would not likely be misled again going forwards.
If you mean that first time customers could be confused and misled, sure, but that’s true for every industry and deceptive advertising laws are the usual recourse, if there’s sufficient motivation to challenge the practice. The only coordination needed is within the prosecutor’s office or whatever organization is responsible for it.
I’m not sure why airline travellers in general need to coordinate around this.
If you mean that first time customers could be confused and misled, sure, but that’s true for every industry and deceptive advertising laws are the usual recourse,
My point is that even for first time customers, it’s hard to do the same thing for prices. Prices are far more transparent than legroom. (Airlines try their best to make prices non-transparent too, thus bag surcharges, but it doesn’t work very well.)
And I’m pretty sure that the airplanes don’t get caught for deceptively advertising legroom. Suing the airline for misleading you about the legroom has tremendous overhead, and if there is some consumer protection agency to force the airlines to stop doing it, they obviously haven’t.
The only coordination needed is within the prosecutor’s office or whatever organization is responsible for it.
Even if prosecutors did do this, there are degrees of deception. It’s possible for an airline to provide a service that’s poor quality, but not so poor quality that it amounts to deceptive advertising, so the airline won’t get prosecuted. Even in this case the airline could claim that they did provide legroom, even if the customer didn’t like it much. The problem is still that the lack of quality is not transparent. It’s difficult to find out that the service is low quality without actually getting on the plane (or undergoing a trivial inconvenience), but prices are out in the open.
What you wrote may be the case, but how does it imply that airline customers in general should coordinate? It’s a huge group of people so the likelihood of efficient coordination is about zero.
But clearly we’ve both established that the degree of impracticality is not equal in all instances. i.e. some types of coordination may be more practical than other types.
Coordination problems of a similar kind have been resolved in other industries, automotive, utilities, telecom, shipping, rail, etc., to an extent that we no longer think about it much.
Going back to the original point before the elaboration of our views regarding coordination problems, it is not possible to hide seat width or legroom once on the plane.
An internet search suggests that extra legroom tends to cost $20-$100, typically in between, which matches what I remember seeing. Have you seen it for $10? If so I need to pay more attention next time and shell out the $10!
Note, however, that it is also to the airline’s benefit, to have their customers argue with each other, blame each other, rather than collectively turn the blame on them. Were the latter to happen, they might lose money (most likely, by means of competitive pricing of extra legroom, on the part of other airlines).
Say that flights are on average 80% full, 20% of passengers are tall and will be miserable for the whole flight if they’re reclined into, 50% of passengers want to recline, and planes are shaped like donuts so that every seat has a seat behind it.
If passengers behave like you, then 8% of passengers are miserable in exchange for 50% of passengers getting to recline. If passengers instead ask before reclining (or unrecline if asked to), then 0% of passengers are miserable and 42% get to recline. The passengers pick between these two situations.
The second situation is better than the first. Should airlines not allow seats to recline, or increase spacing between seats by (say) 12% and thus increase ticket prices by (say) 8%, because passengers like you insist on choosing the first situation over the second?
If passengers instead ask before reclining (or unrecline if asked to), then 0% of passengers are miserable and 42% get to recline. The passengers pick between these two situations.
First: you assume that if someone in front of me reclines then I am miserable, but if I don’t recline when I want to then I am not miserable.
This is a bad assumption. It is entirely unwarranted.
In other words, why do you say that “0% of passengers are miserable and 42% get to recline” is better than “8% of passengers are miserable in exchange for 50% of passengers getting to recline”? You would have to show that the disutility of having the person in front of you recline, exceeds the utility of reclining (or, equivalently, the disutility of not reclining). You have certainly not done so.
Second: have you thought about this problem for five minutes and attempted to find a better solution? Here’s one, just off the top of my head: arrange the passengers such that all the recliners are grouped and all the tall people—who are non-recliners, right? surely they wouldn’t be so hypocritical as to hate when the person in front of them reclines, but recline themselves?—are grouped. That way, with a donut-shaped plane (why are we assuming this, again? but never mind that), there will be at most one (1) tall person who is miserable the whole flight (if the non-tall person in front of him chooses to recline, which is not guaranteed)—but the number of people who get to enjoy reclining is unchanged. This is clearly superior to either of your two scenarios. (Airlines can implement this by selling reclining and non-reclining seats; they could even price-discriminate, perhaps.)
But third, and most importantly, such a naive utilitarian approach to this problem is entirely misguided. Why do you compare only these two situations, and do not include, say, the situation where everyone reclines, customers get angry at the lack of room, and competition forces airlines to provide better layouts? Or the situation where people stop flying as much (because they hate having to not recline, and also hate it when people recline in front of them) and instead take more trains (or whatever)? Or… etc.?
Wow, this got heated fast. Partly my fault. My assumptions were unwarranted and my model therefore unrealistic. Sorry.
I think we’ve been talking past each other. Some clarifications on my position:
I’m not suggesting that one only reclines if one is given permission to do so from the person behind them. I’m suggesting cooperation on the act that is controlled by one person but effects two people. If reclining is a minor convenience to the person in front, but would crush the legs of the person behind, it does not happen. If the person in front has a back problem and the person in back is short, reclining does happen.
None of the blame goes toward other passengers. The blame all goes to the airlines. If you want to recline but don’t get to, that’s the airline’s fault. If you don’t want the person in front of you to recline but they do, that’s the airline’s fault. They should make better seat arrangements. I would preferentially fly on an airline that didn’t stuff me in like cattle. I’m all for protesting with you about this.
If you disagree with this, would you agree that if airplanes were naturally occurring rather than being engineered, then the decision of whether to recline should be a conversation between the two people it effects? If so, what breaks the symmetry between the two effected people, when the situation is engineered by the airline?
EDIT: Or, to get at my emotional crux, if my very long legs would be smooshed if you were to recline, and reclining was a minor convenience for you, would you say “ok, I won’t recline, but let’s be angry at the airline for putting us in this situation”, or “nope I’m reclining anyways, blame the airline”?
Or “pay me to not recline such that it more than covers the loss of utility for me”.
I think this might be more expensive than you think it is, because ability to sleep with less discomfort is very valuable, and many airline seats punish people for being <5′10″.
I’m not suggesting that one only reclines if one is given permission to do so from the person behind them. I’m suggesting cooperation on the act that is controlled by one person but effects two people. If reclining is a minor convenience to the person in front, but would crush the legs of the person behind, it does not happen. If the person in front has a back problem and the person in back is short, reclining does happen.
The problem with this is that it creates an incentive for both people to claim that the magnitude of their inconvenience / discomfort / etc. is the greater one. (See Vladimir_M’s comments on this classic post for a thorough discussion and analysis of this phenomenon.)
If you disagree with this, would you agree that if airplanes were naturally occurring rather than being engineered, then the decision of whether to recline should be a conversation between the two people it effects?
No. The same problem arises in this case also.
Or, to get at my emotional crux, if my very long legs would be smooshed if you were to recline, and reclining was a minor convenience for you, would you say “ok, I won’t recline, but let’s be angry at the airline for putting us in this situation”, or “nope I’m reclining anyways, blame the airline”?
The problem with this question is that your scenario description is only coherent from a god’s-eye view of the situation. From my point of view, the scenario is “reclining is a minor convenience for me, and the person behind me claims that it would be a major discomfort for him if I were to recline”. But if my predictable reaction to such a claim is not to recline, then this means that you had a clear incentive (with no apparent downside) to make the claim, which in turn means that I cannot trust your claim. At the very least, it seems very likely that you’d exaggerate your claim, if not outright fabricate it.
(And, of course, all of this is if we take a utilitarian approach to the matter in the first place.)
There are, at most, two Schelling points here, if we assume that the airlines change nothing about their business practices: (a) everyone reclines whenever they feel like it and are able to do so, and (b) nobody reclines ever. But there is no clear way to get to (b) from where we are, and I personally prefer (a) to (b). (Of course, I even more strongly prefer not to have to have the sort of customer experience where I have to deal with such a choice, and this is just one of the many, many reasons why I don’t fly these days.)
The seat is reclinable and the airline does not communicate to the passengers any rule against reclining it. That means that the passengers have indeed bought the right to recline. The “social conventions” are of no importance whatsoever to that point.
That passengers don’t have the legal right to recline is quite an extraordinary claim. (I do not recall seeing it previously in this discussion, nor in similar ones.) I should like to see some very solid evidence for it. I definitely don’t think there needs to be any positive defense of legality, absent some evidence of illegality. I have never heard anything about reclining being illegal before.
If I pay for a plane ticket, and get a seat that reclines, then I’ve paid for the ability to recline, and that means that I’m reclining. If that creates problems for other passengers, they should address that complaint to the airline, because that’s what the problem is: a conflict between the passenger (who wishes to not be inconvenienced by the reclinability of others’ seats) and the airline (which chooses not to provide enough room between the seats, or otherwise design the seating, such that this problem wouldn’t happen).
I as another customer have no responsibility to ensure that your customer experience is satisfactory (so long as I am not breaking either any applicable laws, or the airline’s terms of use / equivalent). The airline has that responsibility. If they shirk it, that’s on them—not on me.
Blaming other passengers for the fact that your service is unsatisfactory is simply displacement of one’s own sense of powerlessness as a customer.
Far more honest to admit that you are powerless—that you are getting far less of the surplus value of the transaction than you could be, and that you can do nothing to affect this.
One customer has no responsibility to ensure another customer’s experience is satisfactory. One could also point out that a customer (traditionally) has no responsibility to ensure that the staff are satisfied.
But I would say that one human being should consider how their actions might impact on other human beings—even if they happen to the customer. If I am in a restaurant it is possible for me to notice that my loud speaking is annoying to another person and tone it down. By all means recline your seat, I don’t care. But please don’t adopt the general policy that when you are the customer you can suddenly stop thinking about how your actions might effect others.
This is all very well as a general heuristic, and certainly being considerate of other people is a good thing.
But when we find ourselves in a situation where we have paid for some good or service, but then, having done so, are informed that if we actually gain possession of the good / enjoy the service—which we have already paid for!—then we’re bad people… then we should immediately be very suspicious. Because what this indicates, quite reliably, is that this is a situation which has either been deliberately engineered, or deliberately prevented from being resolved, by parties that benefit from this outcome—most obviously, of course, that would be the provider of the good/service, which certainly very much prefers to receive money, but provide nothing.
And so it is in this case. The airline benefits from this situation, as I have noted above. This entire problem could be fixed! It doesn’t have to exist at all. But it does, and the reason why it continues to exist is, in large part, the public perception of it as a moral problem, rather than an economic problem.
And so the bottom line is this: when we are told that reclining our seat on an airplane possibly makes us bad people, we are being cheated out of something that we paid for. The beneficiaries of this fraud are the airlines. And the people who make the moral claim are the airlines’ accomplices.
I, for one, do not care to comply with a moral demand, made by accomplices to a fraud of which I am the victim, that calls for me to participate in my own defrauding. Such a demand calls not for acquiescence, but for spite. Reclining one’s seat and thereby inconveniencing someone who believes that reclining makes you a bad person, is not only not morally blameworthy—on the contrary, it is a positive good. You are thereby doing your part to punish defectors (a prosocial act, without question), and helping to move society toward a state where everyone agrees that reclining a reclinable airplane seat is your right. That is, it seems clear to me, a good thing.
I am not buying “freedom from social punishment”, I am buying “the airline provides me the benefit they advertise”. If they allow this “social punishment” to deprive me of that benefit, then now it’s not “social punishment” anymore, but action by the airline.
And if the “social punishment” does not in fact prevent me from reclining, then what you wrote is just irrelevant.
Many airlines offer extra legroom seats for a few extra dollars. It’s informative that despite how much people complain about airline seats, very few are willing to pay 10 dollars extra to avoid the issue. Airlines listen to people’s wallets, not their mouths.
In my experience, paying for the extra seat room often gives you a seat that doesn’t actually have more legroom, or actually have less (!!) legroom. when the payment is so disconnected from the actual experience, it becomes useless as a signal.
Exactly. The worst transatlantic flight I ever had was one where I paid for “extra legroom”. turns out it was a seat without a seat in front, i.e., the hallway got broader there.
However, other passengers and even the flight attendants certainly didn’t act like this extra legroom belonged to me. Someone even stepped on my foot! On top of that I had to use an extremely flimsy table that folded out of the armrest.
Since most of us aren’t weekly business flyers, this is a far cry from a free market.
This is related to something I’ve often pointed out: the reason why airline customers won’t pay money for better service or amenities is that prices are hard to hide, and quality of service is easy to hide.
I don’t think it’s possible to hide seat width or legroom once on the plane. Or even on a spec sheet, since airplane seats aren’t just randomly bolted wherever based on gut feel. The real issue is duplicity in the sales process as Vitor mentioned.
Case in point many airlines such as Air Canada are getting rid of several rows of economy seats on all their wide-body planes for premium economy seating, where the difference is large enough to be noticeable by everyone. And Air Canada is pretty sizeable so if 15% of their customers are willing to pay for it, and assuming half are private travellers and half are businesses downgrading from business class, then that suggests there’s sold demand among roughly 7.5% of their customer base. This suggests the vast majority of the remainder only complain in words not via their wallets.
I think it is, and the post I was replying to showed an example of that. Sure, if you personally experience “the extra legroom was only because of space that the crew and passengers were encouraged not to treat as mine”, you know about it. But it’s certainly not mentioned if you go to the airline’s web site and get told that the seat has extra legroom. Any airline policies about how the crew is permitted to use the room, and how the crew should let passengers walk into it, won’t be advertised, or even written down. And it’s impractical for consumers to coordinate enough that an airline policy of treating their extra legroom seats this way becomes widely known.
Well the extra legroom wasn’t hidden in Vitor’s example, it just wasn’t as much as the full aisle, since the full aisle is not meant for the exclusive use of the passengers behind it even though the pictures and maybe even the wording would suggest that, especially for those unaware of legal requirements or airline policy. But that’s standard practice on every airline as far as I know. Once someone has experienced that once there’s no need to coordinate anything because it’s not like any airline in the future will actually give over an aisle for exclusive use as legroom.
It was hidden in the sense “finding out about it ahead of time when comparing airlines would be very difficult”. No airline’s web site is going to say “$X for extra legroom, but the plane is set up so that people will walk over it”.
Presumably everyone making ticket purchasing decisions has some form of long term memory and can remember the concept of non-exclusive aisle space. So anyone who’s experienced this once would not likely be misled again going forwards.
If you mean that first time customers could be confused and misled, sure, but that’s true for every industry and deceptive advertising laws are the usual recourse, if there’s sufficient motivation to challenge the practice. The only coordination needed is within the prosecutor’s office or whatever organization is responsible for it.
I’m not sure why airline travellers in general need to coordinate around this.
My point is that even for first time customers, it’s hard to do the same thing for prices. Prices are far more transparent than legroom. (Airlines try their best to make prices non-transparent too, thus bag surcharges, but it doesn’t work very well.)
And I’m pretty sure that the airplanes don’t get caught for deceptively advertising legroom. Suing the airline for misleading you about the legroom has tremendous overhead, and if there is some consumer protection agency to force the airlines to stop doing it, they obviously haven’t.
Even if prosecutors did do this, there are degrees of deception. It’s possible for an airline to provide a service that’s poor quality, but not so poor quality that it amounts to deceptive advertising, so the airline won’t get prosecuted. Even in this case the airline could claim that they did provide legroom, even if the customer didn’t like it much. The problem is still that the lack of quality is not transparent. It’s difficult to find out that the service is low quality without actually getting on the plane (or undergoing a trivial inconvenience), but prices are out in the open.
What you wrote may be the case, but how does it imply that airline customers in general should coordinate? It’s a huge group of people so the likelihood of efficient coordination is about zero.
All I said about coordination is that it’s impractical!
But clearly we’ve both established that the degree of impracticality is not equal in all instances. i.e. some types of coordination may be more practical than other types.
Coordination problems of a similar kind have been resolved in other industries, automotive, utilities, telecom, shipping, rail, etc., to an extent that we no longer think about it much.
Going back to the original point before the elaboration of our views regarding coordination problems, it is not possible to hide seat width or legroom once on the plane.
An internet search suggests that extra legroom tends to cost $20-$100, typically in between, which matches what I remember seeing. Have you seen it for $10? If so I need to pay more attention next time and shell out the $10!
easyJet offers them from 8 pounds, and in the past they haven’t been much more than that in practice (but might have changed now) https://www.easyjet.com/en/terms-and-conditions/fees
Yes, true enough.
Note, however, that it is also to the airline’s benefit, to have their customers argue with each other, blame each other, rather than collectively turn the blame on them. Were the latter to happen, they might lose money (most likely, by means of competitive pricing of extra legroom, on the part of other airlines).
EDIT: I no longer endorse this model.
Say that flights are on average 80% full, 20% of passengers are tall and will be miserable for the whole flight if they’re reclined into, 50% of passengers want to recline, and planes are shaped like donuts so that every seat has a seat behind it.
If passengers behave like you, then 8% of passengers are miserable in exchange for 50% of passengers getting to recline. If passengers instead ask before reclining (or unrecline if asked to), then 0% of passengers are miserable and 42% get to recline. The passengers pick between these two situations.
The second situation is better than the first. Should airlines not allow seats to recline, or increase spacing between seats by (say) 12% and thus increase ticket prices by (say) 8%, because passengers like you insist on choosing the first situation over the second?
First: you assume that if someone in front of me reclines then I am miserable, but if I don’t recline when I want to then I am not miserable.
This is a bad assumption. It is entirely unwarranted.
In other words, why do you say that “0% of passengers are miserable and 42% get to recline” is better than “8% of passengers are miserable in exchange for 50% of passengers getting to recline”? You would have to show that the disutility of having the person in front of you recline, exceeds the utility of reclining (or, equivalently, the disutility of not reclining). You have certainly not done so.
Second: have you thought about this problem for five minutes and attempted to find a better solution? Here’s one, just off the top of my head: arrange the passengers such that all the recliners are grouped and all the tall people—who are non-recliners, right? surely they wouldn’t be so hypocritical as to hate when the person in front of them reclines, but recline themselves?—are grouped. That way, with a donut-shaped plane (why are we assuming this, again? but never mind that), there will be at most one (1) tall person who is miserable the whole flight (if the non-tall person in front of him chooses to recline, which is not guaranteed)—but the number of people who get to enjoy reclining is unchanged. This is clearly superior to either of your two scenarios. (Airlines can implement this by selling reclining and non-reclining seats; they could even price-discriminate, perhaps.)
But third, and most importantly, such a naive utilitarian approach to this problem is entirely misguided. Why do you compare only these two situations, and do not include, say, the situation where everyone reclines, customers get angry at the lack of room, and competition forces airlines to provide better layouts? Or the situation where people stop flying as much (because they hate having to not recline, and also hate it when people recline in front of them) and instead take more trains (or whatever)? Or… etc.?
Wow, this got heated fast. Partly my fault. My assumptions were unwarranted and my model therefore unrealistic. Sorry.
I think we’ve been talking past each other. Some clarifications on my position:
I’m not suggesting that one only reclines if one is given permission to do so from the person behind them. I’m suggesting cooperation on the act that is controlled by one person but effects two people. If reclining is a minor convenience to the person in front, but would crush the legs of the person behind, it does not happen. If the person in front has a back problem and the person in back is short, reclining does happen.
None of the blame goes toward other passengers. The blame all goes to the airlines. If you want to recline but don’t get to, that’s the airline’s fault. If you don’t want the person in front of you to recline but they do, that’s the airline’s fault. They should make better seat arrangements. I would preferentially fly on an airline that didn’t stuff me in like cattle. I’m all for protesting with you about this.
If you disagree with this, would you agree that if airplanes were naturally occurring rather than being engineered, then the decision of whether to recline should be a conversation between the two people it effects? If so, what breaks the symmetry between the two effected people, when the situation is engineered by the airline?
EDIT: Or, to get at my emotional crux, if my very long legs would be smooshed if you were to recline, and reclining was a minor convenience for you, would you say “ok, I won’t recline, but let’s be angry at the airline for putting us in this situation”, or “nope I’m reclining anyways, blame the airline”?
Or “pay me to not recline such that it more than covers the loss of utility for me”.
I think this might be more expensive than you think it is, because ability to sleep with less discomfort is very valuable, and many airline seats punish people for being <5′10″.
The problem with this is that it creates an incentive for both people to claim that the magnitude of their inconvenience / discomfort / etc. is the greater one. (See Vladimir_M’s comments on this classic post for a thorough discussion and analysis of this phenomenon.)
No. The same problem arises in this case also.
The problem with this question is that your scenario description is only coherent from a god’s-eye view of the situation. From my point of view, the scenario is “reclining is a minor convenience for me, and the person behind me claims that it would be a major discomfort for him if I were to recline”. But if my predictable reaction to such a claim is not to recline, then this means that you had a clear incentive (with no apparent downside) to make the claim, which in turn means that I cannot trust your claim. At the very least, it seems very likely that you’d exaggerate your claim, if not outright fabricate it.
(And, of course, all of this is if we take a utilitarian approach to the matter in the first place.)
There are, at most, two Schelling points here, if we assume that the airlines change nothing about their business practices: (a) everyone reclines whenever they feel like it and are able to do so, and (b) nobody reclines ever. But there is no clear way to get to (b) from where we are, and I personally prefer (a) to (b). (Of course, I even more strongly prefer not to have to have the sort of customer experience where I have to deal with such a choice, and this is just one of the many, many reasons why I don’t fly these days.)
The seat is reclinable and the airline does not communicate to the passengers any rule against reclining it. That means that the passengers have indeed bought the right to recline. The “social conventions” are of no importance whatsoever to that point.
That passengers don’t have the legal right to recline is quite an extraordinary claim. (I do not recall seeing it previously in this discussion, nor in similar ones.) I should like to see some very solid evidence for it. I definitely don’t think there needs to be any positive defense of legality, absent some evidence of illegality. I have never heard anything about reclining being illegal before.