YOU’LL PAY FOR THIS!!

Air-seat rage study

Airline passengers would be willing to pay to be able to recline their seats without getting hassled, and the fliers behind them say they’d be OK with that — as long as they get some serious cash, a study shows.

Research by a couple of New York City law professors found that passengers would be fine with paying an average of $12 to lean back without hearing any gripes.

But those behind them want more than triple the amount — about $39 — to make up for the lost space.

On the flip side, fliers who don’t want the guy in front of them reclining would be willing to pay an average of $18 to keep the status quo. But the guys in front said they would want more than twice that amount, or $41, to give up their right.

That's because “people generally don’t like losing things that they have,” wrote Yeshiva University’s Christopher Buccafusco and NYU’s Christopher Jon Sprigman in a post on Slate.

“What we found is that people’s pricing of the right to recline depends on whether they enjoy that right as an initial entitlement,” Sprigman added to Fox News.

“When people have the right to recline — which they do on most airplanes — they want more to give it up than they would be willing to pay to get the right to recline if they don’t have it as an initial right.”

The profs created their online poll to see if there was a way to solve the problem of airline passengers squabbling over reclining rights.

But the difference between what fliers are willing to pay and spend isn’t necessarily a deal-breaker for their scheme — they found passengers were even more open to trading snacks and drinks for reclining rights.

Still, bartering with little bags of pretzels and tiny bottles of booze would only result in a successfully transaction about 36 percent of the time, the study found.

But that was a better success rate than a cash exchange.

And it could be a boon for cash-strapped airlines, they say.

“Everyone wins,’’ the researchers wrote.

“Seat-recline space is efficiently allocated. Airlines are marginally further from bankruptcy. And no one gets punched in the face.”