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http://www.nytimes.com/2014/08/28/upshot/dont-want-me-to-recline-my-airline-seat-you-can-pay-me.html?_r=1&abt=0002&abg=1 I fly a lot. When I fly, I recline. I don’t feel guilty about it. And I’m going to keep doing it, unless you pay me to stop. I bring this up because of a dispute you may have heard about: On Sunday, a United Airlines flight from Newark to Denver made an unscheduled stop in Chicago to discharge two passengers who had a dispute over seat reclining. According to The Associated Press, a man in a middle seat installed the Knee Defender, a $21.95 device that keeps a seat upright, on the seatback in front of him. A flight attendant asked him to remove the device. He refused. The woman seated in front of him turned around and threw water at him. The pilot landed the plane and booted both passengers off the flight. Obviously, it’s improper to throw water at another passenger on a flight, even if he deserves it. But I’ve seen a distressing amount of sympathy for Mr. Knee Defender, who wasn’t just instigating a fight but usurping his fellow passenger’s property rights. When you buy an airline ticket, one of the things you’re buying is the right to use your seat’s reclining function. If this passenger so badly wanted the passenger in front of him not to recline, he should have paid her to give up that right. I wrote an article to that effect in 2011, noting that airline seats are an excellent case study for the Coase Theorem. This is an economic theory holding that it doesn’t matter very much who is initially given a property right; so long as you clearly define it and transaction costs are low, people will trade the right so that it ends up in the hands of whoever values it most. That is, I own the right to recline, and if my reclining bothers you, you can pay me to stop. We could (but don’t) have an alternative system in which the passenger sitting behind me owns the reclining rights. In that circumstance, if I really care about being allowed to recline, I could pay him to let me. Donald Marron, a former director of the Congressional Budget Office, agrees with this analysis, but with a caveat. Recline negotiations do involve some transaction costs — passengers don’t like bargaining over reclining positions with their neighbors, perhaps because that sometimes ends with water being thrown in someone’s face. Mr. Marron says we ought to allocate the initial property right to the person likely to care most about reclining, in order to reduce the number of transactions that are necessary. He further argues that it’s probably the person sitting behind, as evidenced by the fact people routinely pay for extra-legroom seats. Mr. Marron is wrong about this last point. I understand people don’t like negotiating with strangers, but in hundreds of flights I have taken, I have rarely had anyone complain to me about my seat recline, and nobody has ever offered me money, or anything else of value, in exchange for sitting upright. If sitting behind my reclined seat was such misery, if recliners like me are “monsters,” as Mark Hemingway of The Weekly Standard puts it, why is nobody willing to pay me to stop? People talk a big game on social media about the terribleness of reclining, but then people like to complain about all sorts of things; if they really cared that much, someone would have opened his wallet and paid me by now. A no-recline norm would also have troubling social justice implications — for short people. Complaints about knee room are not spread equally across our society. They are voiced mostly by the tall, a privileged group that already enjoys many advantages. I don’t just mean they can see well at concerts and reach high shelves. Tall people earn more money than short people, an average of $789 per inch per year, according to a 2004 paper in the Journal of Applied Psychology. The economists Anne Case and Christina Paxson advanced the theory that tall people earn more because they have higher I.Q.s. Taller men on the dating website OkCupid receive more messages from women and have more sex partners than their short counterparts. Instead of counting their blessings, or buying extra-legroom seats with some of their extra income, the tall have the gall to demand that the rules of flying be reconfigured to their advantage, just as everything else in life already has been. Sometimes — one Upshot editor who shall remain nameless included — they even use the Knee Defender to steal from their fellow passengers. Now that’s just wrong.

Interesting device... But think it's very anti social to use it. I would kpkb if I'm in the receiving end. If need the space then spend money to buy Biz class tickets!! http://travel.asiaone.com/article/news/one-mans-right-is-anothers-wrong 1. What is a Knee Defender? A nifty - or annoying, depending on how you see it - pocket-size device, Knee Defenders are basically sturdy plastic clips.Costing US$21.95 (S$27.41), they come in a set of two, and exist to protect the sacred ground that is an airline passenger's leg room.Opinion on the Knee Defender is varied - some, especially tall people, adore it, while others have taken to label it as plain rude. 2. Sounds interesting. How is it used? Preserving your leg room has never been easier.Users first extend the seat table in front of them, before proceeding to clip one Knee Defender onto each of the table's arms.The Knee Defender can then be slid up and down the table arm, effectively allowing the user to "control" how far the seat in front can recline.The closer the Knee Defender is to the seat in front, the less reclining leeway the seat will have.To top it off, the Knee Defender website even has a printable "Courtesy Card", which manufacturers suggest the user passing to the passenger sitting in front, to inform him or her about the upcoming failure of their seat's recline feature. 3. Why would I need such a device? Aside from the obvious comfort of having sufficient leg room, the space that a Knee Defender gives can be used to, according to the product's website, work on one's laptop or engage in anti-deep vein thrombosis (DVT) exercises.Don't miss these... Knee Defender a hit after in-flight spatFlight diverted because of quarrel over legroom DVT, also known as Economy Class Syndrome, is a medical condition whereby a potentially dangerous blood clot develops in a person, as a result of limited space or movement.Of course, whether or not the Knee Defender is the best solution to these problems is another contentious topic 4. Who invented it? Ira Goldman, a 1.93m tall Washington DC resident who wanted to help fellow tall airline passengers deal with the problem of being "bashed in the knees over and over again". He first marketed the product in 2003. 5. What are airlines' policies over its use? News reports regarding the Knee Defender stem mostly from the US, although its manufacturer's website claims to have purchases from the "7 continents". According to an article in the BBC, the US Federal Aviation Administration has yet to ban the gadget, although most major US airlines, such as United Airlines, have. 6. Where can I buy one? Do you think the Knee Defender is for you? Are you ready to accept the death stares or scowls of disapproval that might result from your using it?