Allocative Efficiency on Airplanes

Shimmon got an aisle seat for the long flight from SFO to Tokyo.  He was up constantly, able to use the bathroom at will, and spent much of his time doing yoga in the back (ask him about adjusting the yoga posture of the uber-cute stewardesses on your own time).  I, on the other hand, was trapped between “consume mass-quantities of any food provided-watch five and a half movies-and get up to pee only once” guy on my left, and “get loaded by drinking as many free alcoholic beverages as possible-and pass out quickly” guy on my right.  With longer legs than either, too much fidgety energy to sit still, and despite a veteran teacher’s bladder a desperate need to pee more than once in a ten hour period, I was trapped in my own uncomfortable hell.  Clearly I avoided all jealousy of Shimmon :) but I was unable to prevent my mind from concocting the following new seating scheme for airlines: base seating on personality type.  The guys next to me should be in the middle.  They’re not moving, ever, and they don’t need an aisle.  But whoever buys their ticket through an agency that allows them to choose their seat in advance gets priority seating, followed by the person who shows up to the ticket counter early.  No one is going to decline the offer of an aisle seat (unless they want the window seat) so you end up assigning seats to people who have no intention of using them properly.  Now you might rightly say that I could have bought a ticket through an agent that would let me choose the seat.  But I’m on this trip on someone else’s dime, and I’m not going to pay any more for a seat on the plane than I have to.  If it were all my money paying for this trip, I suppose I’d have to think hard about the trade-off between paying more by purchasing my ticket through an agent versus paying less by purchasing through Orbitz, but I don’t think I should have to.  If the ticket purchase websites could just add a few brief yes/no questions to their roster (Is your ideal flight one that includes 90% sleep-time?  If given free alcohol would you consume more than six drinks?  Would you rather watch “Marley and Me” than stretch your legs?) then we could all get a little bit more of what we need.