Friday, December 09, 2011

Markets in Everything: Dog Poop Lottery

From The Inquisitr (ht: Mike W.):

"The Taiwanese city of New Taipei this week came up with a unique solution for cleaning their streets of dog feces, they launched a city wide lottery that everyone could participate in. City officials were able to collect 14,500 bags of dog poop from more than 4,000 people, removing half of the cities dog feces from streets and sidewalks.

For each bag turned over to the government a lottery ticket was awarded and eventually a 50-something woman claimed the top prize, a gold ingot worth $2,200.  Government officials also provided 85 other people with prizes ranging from smaller gold pieces to household appliances. This may be the first time that non-dog owners in the city weren’t complaining about other people’s dogs leaving messes in the middle of the cities streets."

MP: Good example of how "incentives matter."

5 Comments:

At 12/09/2011 5:49 PM, Blogger Don said...

Yes, but if they continue this, how long before "dog-poop" farming becomes a problem? ;^)

 
At 12/10/2011 1:06 PM, Blogger Sean said...

It's a good illustration of how guillible people are: the average payment/hr for dog poop removal must be well below the average wage.

 
At 12/10/2011 1:06 PM, Blogger Sean said...

This comment has been removed by the author.

 
At 12/10/2011 9:37 PM, Blogger OBloodyHell said...

>>> It's a good illustration of how guillible people are

1) Did you know the word "guillible" is not in the dictionary? Really. Go look it up. :D

2) I'd suspect it's more a matter of people being out and about and doing it while doing other things than people going out explicitly on "poop patrol".

 
At 12/11/2011 4:37 AM, Blogger Ron H. said...

Sean: "It's a good illustration of how guillible people are: the average payment/hr for dog poop removal must be well below the average wage."

I'm certain it is, but buying lottery tickets makes no sense in any case, so paying with poop doesn't move the silliness meter much further up the scale.

 

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