A Sub-Optimum Solution in a Dormitory Hall

During my freshman year in college, I lived in a very large, all-girls dorm on campus. Now, it is no secret that the weather can get very hot and humid in Georgia. Sometimes the hot weather made living in the dorms miserable.

So, you may be thinking that my dorm didn’t have any air conditioning. Not true! The problem arose from the fact that the dorm’s air conditioning was only effective when everyone kept their windows closed. The game in the dorm looked like this:

1. If I close my window but my neighbor opens her window, then my room will be unbearably hot (no A/C and no breeze from outside)

2. Anytime I open my window – no matter what my neighbor does – my room will be hot… but not as hot as it would be in option 1 (while the A/C won’t work, I will still benefit from the breeze)

3. If I close my window and my neighbor closes her window, then the air conditioning will work and my room will be cool

Therefore, the game actually had two Nash equilibrium based on the payoffs (here I have simplified the logic into a two person game):




While theoretically everyone was better off by closing her window, that’s not how the game played out. When I would get home from class around lunch time, I could look up and see a sprinkling of open windows. By the afternoon, as the temperature outside rose, the number of people who opened their window grew considerably. By nighttime, everyone would give up, open their window, and do their best to try to sleep in the hot dorm.

It was interesting… my hall would have meetings and get everyone to agree to keep their window shut the next day. But without fail, I would come home from class, look up, and see open windows scattered throughout the dorm. So, even if one hall signaled for cooperation, it was no help to the problem.

My opinion is that there were some residents in the dorm who were “not all there.” (they must have somehow missed the signs from the RA’s saying “please shut your windows so the A/C will work”) Their lack of awareness to the payoffs of the game made attaining the optimal solution difficult. But the inability to identify who those people were made attaining the optimal solution impossible. The dorm was too big to be able to look up and pinpoint which windows were open each day. Therefore, there was no way to go knock on doors and ask for cooperation.

I would be interested in going back to see if the same dynamic still played out today. Perhaps all the RA’s decided to fix the problem by becoming the daily window enforcers. Who knows? All I know is I was happy to move into a cooler apartment sophomore year.