Booty call model [updated]
How much would you be willing to pay for your dude to fly in for a few days of you-know-what? It's a highly relevant question right now.
A very simple model would be a sigmoidal function over time [since last encounter]; slowly increasing at first, a more or less linear increase during a certain time window and after a certain number of days it levels off. Right now I'm on the middle part of the curve (slope is more or less vertical); tonight this suga mama would say 380 euros /480 $ for a flight between Scotland and Sweden is a bargain and there is no leveling off in sight just yet.
[this will require some more development to include seasonality, hormon cycles, personal finances, grant deadlines, relationship status etc. I expect the model to be fairly general but the parameterization highly individual. Will be working on it. When the grant deadline(s) are over for this year. Maybe. Any suggestions most welcome]
Depending on the amount of time since you last saw each other? Personally, I think $500 sounds reasonable :)
ReplyDeleteyeah, well, I didn't state that explicitly, but that was the time-axis in the the simplest model; "time since last encounter"
ReplyDeleteI agree with Chall (as so often before). I bet SAS has some good deal, they even have good deals to/from the US these days, but I also suspect that you might have deadline on Wednesday. Which reminds that I really wasn't supposed to read blogs but to work on that proposal... (Btw, I think this is the first time I comment, although I've been reading for a long time.)
ReplyDeleteI don't get it. Why is it sigmoidal? Why isn't it exponential?
ReplyDeleteYou do what you gotta do, okay?
ReplyDeleteI'd say go for it!
ReplyDeleteN.A. and I thought $600 was pretty reasonable last semester, when it seemed unlikely that I would be living in the same state in the summer.
Now that we've solved our two-body problem, $600 bucks seems like a lot when we'll be together (forever...muhahahaha) and getting a house. But then again....it's been months since "you-know-what-"
Maria, you're right about the deadline, wrong about good deals. Sas prices are sky rocketing these days
ReplyDeleteTR, I initially went for exponential but decided to include some implicit assumption about a max price. Must be made more explicit in the final model description.
ReplyDeleteSilver Fox; of course, but much more fun procrastinating this way
ReplyDeleteUnbalanced reaction; huh? months? I would claim that to be impossible, but then I guess I was never forced to wait more than 8 weeks.
ReplyDeleteLate reaction as usual.
ReplyDeleteThat IS a though question. One expensive flight/stay or two cheaper ones? How much more expensive than the minimum price are you willing to do? I think your equation needs to include also some fraction of how the current price relates to min/max price that tend to be osberved for that trip and the length of the stay. (How helpful is that? :p)
In any case I find in such situations that shitty ways to travel (eg Ryanair) are OK but can be horrible if say, one is refused check in because the company overbooked like hell and finds any excuse to refuse people (my blood pressure's going up just to think of it).
Good luck with this question.
the dude seems to be OK with Ryan air and other horrible airlines, but I can't deal with it.
ReplyDeleteDefinitely depends on hormone cycles as well as airline pricing cycles ;)
ReplyDeleteAs a grad student, $400 was my limit and it required 2 days of travel each way. Now I'd up it to around $600. We went 4 months without seeing each other and I'd probably pay more to avoid that again...
ReplyDeleteAlbatross; 4 months is pretty tought; I think 2 months have been the longest for us so far
ReplyDeletecath; oh yes the cycles, the cycles. You think hey I'm good and I've been good for days and the next thing you know your in a black hole and wonder where the hell that came from (of course I'm referring to the daily check of airline fares here)