How to get free breast implant surgery
A grad student I’m working with is writing a paper about alternative financing. There are peer-to-peer lending services like Kiva and Prosper, then there are services that focus on equity. Alex Tabarrok recently linked to Thrust Fund, which allows students to finance their education by paying a share of their lifetime income to their investors.
I’m very interested in yet another model: donation-based for-profit funding. Kickstarter is the poster child for this concept. An indie band can seek funds (say $5,000) to finance recording an album. Fans can make contributions large and small. They are incentivized because they receive rewards for their contributions. Donations of $5 of more might get you access to the band’s behind-the-scenes blog, $1000 might get you and some friends backstage at a show. The trick is that none of the funds are released until the fundraising goal is met. Kickstarter takes a small cut for facilitating the transaction.
Today I’ve come across another donation-based funding site that predates Kickstarter by a few years and is very alternative. MyFreeImplants.com is exactly what you think it is. From an article about the site:
Guys who are willing to front the $9.95 monthly membership fee get chat access to every woman on the site, along with access to each woman’s photo galleries, blog, and whatnot. Benefactors can donate money directly to their favorites; the women can send spicy photos and the like to their benefactors in return if they so choose. No phone numbers, e-mail addresses, or other contact information is exchanged — the guys give money without ever getting to meet the girls. All benefactor bucks are collected by the site management and held in escrow by an associated trust for each client’s benefit. Once a given woman on the site racks up enough benefactor bucks to pay for her procedure, the trust pays the doctor out of escrow–in full, and in cash. After the surgery, women who have their breast enhancement funded by MyFreeImplants.com are contractually obligated to stay on the site for six months, chatting with their benefactors and providing them with confidential “after” photos for scrapbooking purposes.
In this case the company keeps the money in escrow, which raises many questions, such as what happens if the goal isn’t met, and who keeps the interest the money earns in escrow? Kickstarter, on the other hand, doesn’t collect a penny until the goal is met. I wonder if women seeking implants might move to Kickstarter since it seems to offer them more flexibility.
What’s really exciting about this model is it can help solve some basic collective action problems. As Mancur Olsen found, you get can organize a big group only if you give folks an “individualized benefit,” and this seems to fit the bill. I predict political candidacies and grassroots issue campaigns funded this way. Any ideas for a project we could start?
