March Archive Highlight - “Pay Up - pt 5; “On Your Terms"”

This is the fifth in a series of posts about my experiments in different payment Systems across my projects The Telelibrary, Fair Trade, and Undersigned).

If you’re been eagerly following every post, I’m grateful, I’m surprised, and I’m pleased to announce your ordeal is almost over.

If you’re starting here and want context for this whole endeavor (but not a full odyssey, go ahead and read just the first post, then come back here.

Otherwise, if you’re only interested in Fair Trade and refuse any preparatory context—congrats, you have a lot in common with Viggo Mortensen.

Now that we know who’s who, let’s begin:

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Fair Trade, is a project co-authored by myself and experience designer Jessica Creane. In this piece, two strangers bring 3 items each to attempt to negotiate an exchange. This trade must take place across the gulf of misunderstanding between unfamiliar parties, the oceans of disparity between individual beliefs, and one entirely non-metaphorical screen, which keeps participants unknown to each other. Over the course of 70 minutes, we explore what it means to understand someone else’s position, and how possible it is for any trade to be fair. Then, we make our best attempt at the fairest trade possible.

So, what do we charge for all that?

At this point, across appearances at two Philadelphia Festivals, there have been 15 public performances of Fair Trade, with 30 participants.

For both festivals, reservations were made available at two price points, $20 or $50 (reflecting the sliding scale suggestions organizers used for other programming); as a result, the average price paid for purchased tickets* ended up being $27.78 — at first.

When thinking about “Payment as a Lowered-Obstacle to Accessibility” (our first focal point in the ongoing series), there’s some limited functionality worth noting here: 70.97% of participants paid the lower price, while 22.58% paid the higher amount (remaining participants were able to access the experience at no upfront cost by agreeing to be Standby Participants). Functionally, that means that 7 people being willing to pay more upfront reduced the barrier entry for everyone else by about $8—but that’s only half the story. After all, like all the pieces discussed in this series, Fair Trade complicates the process of payment as a path to deepening the experience.

In this iteration of Fair Trade, we invited participants to explore the notion of fairness through a series of prompts, exercises, and small exchanges, building up to a trade between the two of them. After they proposed their final offers to each other, we called their attention to the exchange they had made with us:

FACILITATOR:
Each of you paid money to be here - $20 up front [disclose if different]. At that time, I set the price; you didn’t know what you’d receive, and I didn’t know if you’d show up. Now that we both know better, I’m going to give that money back, so that we can renegotiate; you’re still going to pay for this experience, but this time, you get to set the price.

[Stage Direction: Hand Participants Cash]

[...] Tomorrow morning, you’ll receive an email, with instructions on how to pay for your experience today.

So what happened when we gave 30 people their money back? In short; on average, participants adjusted the price to pay us more.

The average final contribution was $37.42, with participants adding an average of $10.87 to their original ticket price. 93.33% of participants decided to pay us something, rather than keeping the money, and 73.33% made their payment within the first 3 days after their experience**. Looking at the distribution of payments below, we see four contributions below the original price (including two folks who never returned any money at all), and then notable clusters at the original $20 and $50 amounts. We also see a pretty significant amount of contributions that fall above those payment thresholds, including a majority that represent a 40-75% increase on the original ticket price.

Being able to generate a layout like this is helpful for our second goal in this series: “Payment as a Form of Direct Feedback & Gathering Data;” it allows participants to communicate an “average value” for the piece, but also lets us look at specific increases. Similarly, when looking at “Payment as a Space for Meaning Making,” this layout lets us culminate a few different threads of the piece, and lets us use payment as a means to extend their experience into the day (or days) following it.

There are limits to this as feedback. We can’t say concretely that these adjustments were made exclusively because participants valued the piece more than their original ticket price (that the two participants who didn’t pay anything back didn’t value their experience at all). But we can check to see if there is evidence of other factors that may have been at play, to better imagine what this money might mean. Namely, can we see connections between the choices participants made and answers they gave during their experience and how much they ultimately chose to pay for it?

Let’s look at 4 factors:

Once they’ve negotiated the terms of their final exchange, participants are asked 1) if they believe the trade will be fair and 2) if they care if the trade will be fair. They also must together decide if ) 3they really do want to trade, and 4) if they want to finally meet when they do so (participants who do not trade cannot meet).

 

A few numbers really jump out here. Only a few participants described the proposed trade as “not fair,” but their average contribution stands out as being much higher than that of the majority of participants who said it was fair. When we control for initial ticket price and just look at the adjustment to their initial payment, we actually see an even more pronounced difference, almost twice as high. However, here is where the small sample size throws us - among the tiny “not fair” crowd, there is one notably high adjustment of ~$67 which skews both of these average numbers.

Still, it is interesting to see that we see a predicted reduction in average contribution when participants think the trade would be fair, Care that it is, and agree to make a trade. When aggregating this data, I assumed that we would see higher average contributions when participants made more social choices that suggest stronger attachment to or interest in the stranger they are trading with. Instead, it’s a mixed bag. Caring or not Caring about the fairness of the exchange could suggest they’ve experienced a shift, as over the course of this draft we challenged participants to consider how much “Fairness” really achieved or represented their ideals. Examining whether or not participants traded gives us conflicting stories: higher average payments for “no trade” pairs, but lower adjustments. Looking more carefully at the data, we see that almost all of the “no trade” pairs made no adjustment at all, whereas one increased their contribution.

Only using whether or not participants met shows consistent increases in value, with the average contribution, average adjustment to upfront cost, and rates of contribution all notably lower than among participants who did meet.

So what do we walk away with? In terms of answers, few definite insights; the small sample size and lack of screamingly non standard deviations can only call us to look more closely at certain patterns in future sessions. However, in terms of our fourth and final consideration of Payment Systems “as a Path to Profit,” what we walk away with is an average of $10-11 extra from every participant. That’s no small bump on price per ticket, and it tracks with a finding from similar analyses of payments from the other two works we examined in this series, Undersigned and The Telelibrary: making oneself vulnerable to an audience by letting them change or otherwise determine their payment seems to result in higher profits, not lower. Additionally, when this risk is presented thoughtfully and connected with the themes of a show, the potential rewards are broad, and are shared with participants, who experience more accessibility, accountability, and opportunities to create meaning.

If everyone receives a better return on their investments, that sounds like a Fair Trade to me***.

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*”average price paid for purchased tickets” - why the tortured phrasing? Aside from everything that’s wrong with me as a person, this is also because we had four standby participants, who got their slots after the original ticket holders didn’t show up, and thus experienced the piece at no cost. If we look at the breakdown of adjusted contributions excluding the participants with no upfront cost, we see small changes:

Average Contribution: $34.34

Average Adjustment: $9.14

Percentage people who paid: 92.00%

**Jessica and I had a lot of conversations about what it means to add a “ask” or obligation after the official runtime of the piece. We shared concerns about it feeling like an intrusion on time we had no right to, and about the ways that “after” components of interactive works often set a participant up for failure; when asked to complete a task without the structure and support of a piece (and time you’ve already dedicated to attending that piece), it can be hard to follow-through with even things that you’d like to do. Those “failures” can really color the way a participant feels about an experience in hindsight. As such, we wanted to find ways to position participants for success: we sent an email the next morning with multiple payment options, and promised to send a reminder after 3 days. At the 3 day mark, we re-sent all information, and told participants that we would consider their contribution to be $0 unless we heard back.

*** It’s impossible to know definitively if it would be the same for you, though. Incidentally, for more resources on questions like these, I recommend attending Fair Trade.