Poolside sunbed race

Why do guests rise at dawn to claim chairs that nobody wanted at dawn?

At seven in the morning the pool deck is empty of people and covered in towels. The chairs those towels are holding were entirely free an hour earlier, and will sit unused for another three hours. So the guests did not get up at six because they wanted a chair at six. They got up at six because of what other guests would do at seven.

That is a strange thing to have to say about a holiday, and it is worth taking seriously rather than treating as bad manners. What kind of situation makes reasonable people spend the best hours of a rest doing something none of them enjoys?

Start by asking what is actually scarce. Not chairs in general — a resort with ninety guests usually owns enough frames. What is scarce is a particular chair at a particular hour: the shaded front row at eleven, when everyone wants it at once. Call it sixty good chairs and ninety interested guests.

Now ask how those sixty are allocated. Not by price: the chairs are bundled into the room rate, so the extra cost of taking one is zero. Usually not by booking either. The house rule, mostly unwritten, is possession — the first towel wins.

Put those two facts together and something has to follow. If a thing is genuinely wanted by more people than can have it, and its money price is zero, then something else must do the rationing. What is left? Time. Guests compete by being early, and the claiming hour slides until the last person to bother is only just willing to bother. That is the mechanism Yoram Barzel set out in 1974 in his account of rationing by waiting: when price cannot clear a market, waiting does, and it clears at the point where the marginal claimant is indifferent.

Follow the slide one step at a time. Suppose everyone rises at eight and the chairs are gone by five past. If I rise at ten to eight I am certain of one. But my neighbour can reason exactly as I did, and so can hers. Nothing stops the retreat except the growing pain of the alarm clock, which is why it settles somewhere around dawn rather than running to midnight — an equilibrium, but a miserable one.

Notice what the towel itself contributes. If holding a chair required sitting in it, holding one all morning would cost you the morning. The towel breaks that link: it makes a claim cheap to place and awkward for anyone else to challenge, since a stranger's belongings feel like a person who has just stepped away. So the entire day's supply can be committed in one short burst at dawn by people who then go back to bed.

Here is the part that makes it a collective-action problem rather than merely a race. Ask each guest which they would prefer: the present arrangement, or a binding agreement that nobody claims before nine. Almost everyone prefers the agreement — same chairs, same allocation roughly, two hours more sleep each. Yet the agreement cannot hold itself up. Given that everyone else is honouring it, the guest who slips down at five to nine gets a front-row chair at almost no cost. The defection is individually attractive precisely because everyone else complied. That is why appeals to consideration do so little: they change how the situation feels without changing what any single guest gains by deviating.

And ask who receives what is spent. Nobody. A money price at least transfers — the hotel takes it, and could spend it on more shade. The sleep given up at dawn is simply gone, received by no one. Economists call that dissipation, and it is the sharpest diagnostic available here: the guests pay a real cost and the total is not merely redistributed but destroyed.

Which points at what actually works, since exhortation does not. Every effective remedy changes the allocation rule rather than the guests. Staff who clear unattended towels after a stated interval restore the link between claiming and being present, so holding becomes expensive again. Booking systems ration openly. Charging for premium beds converts the dissipated dawn into a transfer the hotel can reinvest. Each has a real cost of its own, though, and the enforcement one is not trivial — clearing a towel means a staff member having an argument with a paying guest, which is why many resorts announce the rule and quietly decline to apply it.

The reflex explanation is character: some guests are selfish. But the same guests queue politely at the buffet, where the rule is different, and behave differently again at a resort where staff clear towels. The behaviour tracks the rule, not the nationality or the temperament, and a model that predicts it from the rule is doing more work than one that predicts it from the people.

It is also worth being precise about what is being competed away. The race does not reduce the number of chairs, and it does not clearly change who ends up on them — light sleepers and early risers gain a little. What it destroys is the surplus: the difference between what a chair is worth and what it cost to get. Under first-come rationing that difference is competed down toward zero, so guests end up paying, in sleep, roughly what a front-row bed is worth to them. They just pay it to nobody.

One honest limit: where chairs comfortably exceed demand there is no scarcity to ration and no race. The dawn towel is a symptom of a binding shortage, and its absence at a quiet hotel is not evidence of better-mannered guests.

• Why enforcing a towel rule is itself a cost the hotel must weigh, and what that says about which rules survive.
• Other zero-price allocations that dissipate rather than transfer — overnight queues, ticket lotteries, first-come parking.

Every term the collection defines is gathered in the glossary.