<<It doesn't take that much effort to show the courtesy of preparing detailed records for your *guests* at at tournament.>> In reading the below over again I've realized how rambling it became. Oh well. Something that this implies...Whether visiting teams are guests, customers, or opponents, the obligation is on them as much as on the host to be courteous, timely, and responsible about the rules of the house. The requirements of a QB team aren't, I think, standard, but more of a continuum. The variations I've seen: - GW would probably take a receipt written in pencil on a napkin. - Michigan requires general contact information. - George Mason requires a Tax ID number and preapproval (way beforehand) for each expense. - Hopkins doesn't give out money until the expense has already been incurred, and requires a receipt on university letterhead. For GW's tournaments, we've for the past few years been using a general-purpose receipt/invoice form that covers all of Michigan's requirements (contact address & phone, itemized breakdown of expenses). However, even this doesn't cover the requirements of three of our most frequent customers (Georgetown, Mason, Hopkins). Why not generalize the form even more? - customers beyond the standard constitute a minor portion of the field - customers beyond the standard have very different requirements - getting university letterhead is a pain. What to do? Generally, make the exceptions aware that if they don't pay us, it's only an hour to Baltimore and we're bigger than they are; where possible, arrange fee-swaps so the amount of real money exchanged is closer to $30 than $180. Incidentally, this last part I think illustrates an economic incentive in hosting vs. not hosting; if you and each of your "neighbor schools" host tournaments, and you each go to each others' events, and all tournaments within the neighborhood (I use "neighborhood" to denote an indefinite region containing schools likely to attend each others' events, e.g. the mid-Atlantic corridor between NYC and Durham, or Southern California) are roughly equivalent in price and some loosely defined "quality" or "desirability", then the net exchange of money within the neighborhood should be very close to zero (for those of you still paying attention -- you could probably turn this into a real model by imagining the divergence of some nonconservative "money field"). Why is this an incentive? - It drives capital investment in the circuit in the form of buying buzzers & clocks to get discounts - It increases continuity of the circuit by encouraging teams to bring their dusty old fogeys along to moderate - It drives the economics of the circuit away from the monopolistic and oligopolistic models of days of yore toward the MC model I think we're approaching, which is good for everyone except CBI (and in the short run for NAQT, TRASH and veteran tournaments; I trust that this group is capable of long views toward the common good) [note that a PC circuit is impossible and undesirable as long as tournament-to-tournament results are consistent; "if anything can happen, does it matter if anything does?"] Edmund
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