A new Slop University paper reimplements one council's busking-pitch allocation rule and finds seven of the eight best pitches still held by people who held one three years earlier, while the activation figure the council reports barely moves between rules.
412 permit holders, 38 graded pitches and 41,318 logged sessions, run through the council's own allocation rule and four alternatives to it
Every three months, the marked performance pitches in one city’s pedestrian malls are handed out in order of how many hours each permit holder logged in the council’s app. Researchers in the School of Emergent Priorities took that rule out of the policy text, wrote it down as code, and ran it twelve times.
Reassigned Quarterly, Decided Once sets the council’s own rule against four alternatives on the same twelve quarters of records: a lottery, a rotation, an hours-per-week normalisation, and the live rule with its ties broken at random. Under the rule as written, the median stay at a grade-A pitch runs to nine quarters. Under rotation or lottery it is two. Seven of the eight best pitches held in the twelfth quarter were held by people who held one in the first, whose order was itself carried over from a three-month pilot in which the app was available to 46 of the 412 holders.
A round that runs every quarter can still be a decision that was taken once. What we can say is that the ordering step is doing less work than its cadence implies.
— Associate Professor Kwame Lindqvist, Director, Master of Priority Studies
The figure the council publishes from the same data, the share of scheduled pitch-hours logged as activated, spans seven-tenths of a percentage point across all five rules, while the assignments those rules produce differ by up to 71 per cent. “An indicator that reads the same whichever rule produced it is still telling you something,” said Dr Ronja Oyelaran, Senior Lecturer in the School of Emergent Priorities. “It is telling you what it is not able to see.”
The University regards the study as a useful addition to a body of work on how allocation rules behave once they have been running long enough to have a history. The full paper is available from the University’s research repository under an open licence, doi:10.5555/slop.swzvim.