A study of a campus lunch van's happy-hour deadline finds portion size and counter conversation both fall sharply once the discount lapses, prompting the University to move the deadline five minutes later.
A regression-discontinuity study found portion size and counter chat both step downward the instant a campus food van's discount lapses.
The clock on a single campus lunch van’s happy-hour sign has moved five minutes later, and the School of Emergent Priorities says the change follows directly from what its own instruments found either side of the old one. The School counts the result among the clearer cases yet that its counter-mounted instruments are worth trusting with an actual decision.
A deadline is supposed to move a price and nothing else. It took a scale and a listening device at the counter to notice it was moving quite a bit more than that.
— Sunniva Balogun, Doctoral Candidate, School of Emergent Priorities
The study paired 94 days of transaction timestamps with two independent instruments trained on the counter itself — a scale beneath the serving tray and a listening device tuned to server-customer conversation — and found both stepping downward in the same instant the discount lapsed, while a control measure entirely outside anyone’s influence at the counter stayed flat throughout. Professor Verity Marris, who supervises the doctoral research behind the finding, said it extends a pattern the School keeps running into: “the instruments we build to check one thing near a counter like this one have a habit of finding something we weren’t looking for right beside it.”
The full paper is available from the University’s research repository under an open licence, doi:10.5555/slop.vov8h7.