March 22, 2008
Dear Economist: How can I create an incentive scheme to keep our house clean?
Dear Economist,
My fiancee is moving in with me. We’ve lived together before, and we hate housework. Before, we didn’t do work in retaliation for housework not done by the other. This led to a suboptimal equilibrium of dirty floors and resentful cohabitants. This time I want to create an incentive scheme to keep our house clean and us happy. I am reluctant to assign monetary value to chores, as this can backfire. Weekly rewards, such as choosing a Friday night restaurant, seem gimmicky. But I can’t think of a better idea. I have racked my brain and time is running out! Help me, Undercover Economist, you are my only hope.
Home Alone
Dear Home Alone,
If this were a holiday fling, the outcome would be clear: each of you would prefer the other to wash the champagne flutes and make the bed in the mornings, but lacking any mechanism to enforce co-operation you might both slack off and feel resentful. It is often the case that brief encounters can be mutually exploitative.
Yet economic theory, experiment and practical experience all suggest that in the most unpromising situations, the bitterest adversaries find a way to get along when they are stuck with each other. Reciprocity seems to be the key. Soldiers in the trenches of Flanders practised “live and let live” when the generals were not looking. The cold war did not end in mutual annihilation.
I venture to say that if this time you and your fiancee can’t even match the grudging co-operation of Khrushchev and Kennedy, you will at least be warned before the wedding day that housework is the least of your worries.
Questions to economist@ft.com
One creative solution to the problem of how to allocate household tasks is Chore Wars - http://www.chorewars.com. It makes a game of the whole thing, rather in the mould of World of Warcraft or Everquest, and awards experience points to the “characters” for ironing, taking out the bins etc.
Posted by: Seamus McCauley | March 24th, 2008 at 1:36 pm | Report this commentChore Wars looks promising. If it doesn’t work, the old fashioned way of minimising the pain is to jointly break down the list of things to be done into a set of a good many identifiable tasks. When that is agreed,each partner takes turns in assigning a task to the other. Toss a coin to start. At the end, or any time thereafter, you can trade tasks with one another. This creates a roughly equitable initial distribution of misery, which is refined and improved by the follow-on market.
If you cannot agree on the list, have your separation dinner in a restaurant.
Posted by: David Heigham | March 24th, 2008 at 6:43 pm | Report this commentHow astute of the man to recognise the tenacity of his habits–ruling out the use of
1 monetary costs (mindful of one’s own limits thus fearful of its consequences to oneself)
2 non-monetary rewards (mindful of one’s incorrigibility thus aware of the limits of non-monetary incentives).
Has a more simple solution been overlooked in the search for a novel economic tool:
3 hire a regular cleaner (in the end, it costs much less in monetary terms to outsource the task … and if it saves the relationship, the non-monetary rewards should make it worth the monetary costs).
If the third was ruled out simply because one is stingy, then how astute of the Undercover Economist to recognise the prospects of the marriage.
Posted by: HKLivingston, 26, investment banker | March 26th, 2008 at 4:19 am | Report this commentAs Axelrod showed many years ago, the most effective incentive scheme is also the simplest: tit-for-tat. Tit: if you do you chore well, I’ll up the ante by doing mine even better. Tat: if you don’t, I won’t either. Both parties sign a bargain.
In a dynamic contest, you’ll need to include a reset condition, to avoid unstable escalation or implosion to the bad box in the prisoner’s dilemma. This could be something like this: once a month, we both share the chores and redo the entire living space together, or hire a cleaning service to do it. Then, we redistribute the chores, sign a new tit-for-tat contract, and begin from scratch.
Experiments show that this should lead to a stable equilibrium where both parties settle down to abiding by the terms of the contract.
Good luck. If it doesn’t work, it’s because you’re really not meant for each other, after all.
Posted by: Carl Dahlman | March 26th, 2008 at 12:59 pm | Report this comment[…] a comment on last week’s Dear Economist, Carl Dahlman wrote: As Axelrod showed many years ago, the most […]
Posted by: FT.com | The Undercover Economist | Tit for Tat: over-rated | April 2nd, 2008 at 7:51 am | Report this comment