Team Production with Gift Exchange

Anytime I think of gift exchange, I automatically tie it to the phrase " I would scratch your back if you scratch mine". Gift exchange in a non-economic term reminds me of Secret Santa (as Christmas season is fast-approaching). You buy a gift for someone and the person  buys a gift for you in return. Sometimes, you get the same monetary value for the gift if you measure it. Other times, You might see that you spent more effort and money buying someone a gift, while the other person doesn't. Of course, this is completely different in Economics as gift exchange is based on the positive relationship between workers effort levels and wages. 

Now, to the first article on How to Get the Rich to Share the Marbles. It focuses on team productivity and successful outcome. For the share-the- spoils, the kids were able to pull the rope together and get more marbles compared to pulling the roles individually and only getting more ropes. The interesting fact is that the kids were able to work together with hardly no conflict as they were each willing to share the marbles equally. Teamwork led to higher rates of sharing as kids are usually reluctant to share. One can also compare the finders-keeper scenario where kids had marbles they didn't work to get in front of them. They were less likely to share their marbles. In fact, other kids were unlikely to ask  For pullers-keeper, each person did the same work but individually, so less people were willing to share their marbles equally. One can infer from the above scenarios that collective work and effort motivates others to share equally. In fact, the article draws our attention to the fact that group work yields more efficient result than individual action, which implies that two heads are better than one. 

 I was able to relate the first article to my life as a student. I am taking some classes with three of my friends.  I am always willing to help out as much as I can if they get stuck on an assignment or they don't have enough time to complete their work. I don't do this only because we are friends, but because I am aware of their high effort level. The zeal to help comes from within because I can speak to their productivity from working with them. I consider us a team where everyone has days they can slack off.  When there is evidently teamwork, people are willing to share more. I also think this applies to group project where everyone gets the same grade. The hope is that everyone puts in the same effort or at least close to it. In this case, the team is always pleased about everyone getting the same grade compared to when some team members did not contribute to the success of the group project. 

The second article focuses on When a Child Thinks Life is Unfair. Humans, even from our early age want fair treatment.The article suggests applying game theory strategies to help children make fair decisions. Option 1, I cut, you pick strategy helps children divide simple things so that making a choice can be easier for children. This option might be complicated if the thing to be divided have a different value to the children. Option 2 is the tit for tat method where children are faced with the job of doing things such as cleaning up a joint mess. This usually works because it encourages one to do work since others are working as well. Option 3 which is the random dictator is mostly used in a family setting, especially when it is hard to decide. Everyone is collectively involved in the decision process, but only one decision is chosen and that's at random. The last option is auctioning and this happens when the highest bidder wins. For auctioning, one has to be certain that it is something they want before committing to it. The article used doing chores or Halloween candy as currency as an example. 

Growing up, my mum used the tit for tat and auctioning strategy for us. My sister and I are two years apart, and there was constant jealousy from both of our parts. Sometimes, I was jealous that she got away with doing chores because she was older. She was also often jealous that I had more candies during parties or I was pampered by getting big share of meat or milk. My mum often called it siblings rivalry, but I felt we just wanted everything to be "fair". I was more willing to do chores when I knew my sister was also doing it, compared to when I am the only doing chores while she is inside watching cartoons. Reflecting back on it now, it could have been the case that she was just faster in completing these chores, but to me it felt like she had less work than me. 

The third article, Power of Altruism was quite interesting. It focused on human's behavior as it relates to morals. The article explains how different sides such as psychologist, philosophers and economist view people's behavior either as selfishness, self-interest or just maximizing power. However, the author David Brooks thinks that the push of selfishness is matched by the pull of empathy and altruism. That means, one's expectation often influences the way people act. The bigger pictures focuses on how economic motivation yields bad outcome. This statement made me think about Thursday's class discussion where Professor Arvan encouraged us not to only think about our financial outcomes in terms of jobs and salaries, but also be involved in volunteering. I totally agree with this because one puts in his or her best without the influence of economic transaction. The question about potential interest, altruism or opportunism doesn't play in volunteering because you aren't expecting any incentive.

Something that came to my mind while reading the article: The Illinois Leadership Center on campus usually host about 5-6 I-programs each semester. These programs are usually a day long, starting at 10am-4pm on Saturdays. They have variety of programs which are on team work, integrity, leadership strength, and many more. The programs are open to undergraduate and graduate students and there is mostly 100 people max for each programs. There are no favoritism or priority in terms of who has the chance to sign up for the program before it goes live to students. However, students that are completing their leadership certificate or leadership minors are required to attend two of these I-programs. Also, these programs counts as James Scholars hours, as well as extra credit opportunities by some professors. So, the demand is high, but there is limited supply. The ILC tries to gauge this by charging a $50 fee for students that do not cancel at least 8 days before program if they can't make it. One would be surprised that this hasn't stopped a lot of students from cancelling before the deadline. I have heard students say they don't cancel because the $50 fee is not a huge amount. Therefore, they do not feel bad about not cancelling ahead of time if they can't make it, although cancelling on time would give other students the opportunity to sign up for these programs. To them making the $50 payments have become an economic transaction.