Fair and Unfair at the NFL [Yoo, Week 8, Dialogue]

I caught myself nodding my head to Agata's argument. Her example about Starbucks was especially intriguing, and reminded me about something I had read about in Economics 1. In economics, something we learn about is that in general, customers make rational decisions. An economist by the name of Alan Krueger studied the question of why the NFL does not charge a price for Super Bowl tickets that is high enough to make the quantity of tickets demanded equal to the quantity of tickets available. Although the price of a Super Bowl ticket is high, there still is enough demand that even if the tickets were priced way higher, the tickets would still sell. In a true theoretical market economy, the NFL should charge a price way higher than currently, and still sell every single ticket. Yet the NFL does do this. In fact, they go through the difficulty of allocating 500 pairs of tickets to give ordinary fans a chance to attend the game. More than 36,000 apply. Scalpers have sold tickets for as much as 5,000 dollars. Even with this extraordinary demand, a survey found that fans would deem is 'unfair' if the NFL raised the price of tickets to 1,500 dollars instead of 400 dollars regularly. Interestingly, a question asked people how much they were willing to pay as well. Even 83% of those who said they would pay up to 1,500 said raising the price would be unfair. Krueger concluded that whatever the NFL might gain in the short run from raising ticket prices. it would more than lose in the long run from alienating football fans.

Even though this is a rather superficial example, it leads me to ask the question: Is being ethical a rational decision, or a behavioral one? I'm thinking that perhaps being ethical is a behavioral decision, and that being ethical is an economic one. You might say being ethical is what ought to be, while being not is what is.