Roommates, Chores, and Making the Pareto-Optimal Move

How do we deal with a roommate who won't do her chores? This can be a big issue. After all, a clean apartment is a public good that everyone* can enjoy. Although our dominant strategy would be to not clean to avoid the costs of spent time, everyone would be better off if we all did our weekly chores.

My apartment has been experiencing this issue recently, and I instantly recognized it as a classic prisoner's dilemma situation. My immediate thought was: "If we want A to do her chores, we should all stop doing ours until she does her fair share. Then, she'll know that if she does her chores, we'll do ours too!"

The Internet had some advice as well. This article suggested that we develop a mini market economy and use chores to gain "points". Certain chores would earn more points than others. This means that when one person is not able to do a certain chore that week, they can pay another person “points” to have them do the chores instead. Of course, as a result of market transactions, everyone is better off! However, we cannot keep any one person from experiencing the benefits from the clean apartment, and therefore we may still have free riders. This does not solve the problem.

In the end, my roommates came up with the best solution. When sharing my idea with them, they replied: "We'll keep doing our chores, because then we can actually tell A to do her chores as well." They were taking it upon themselves to be the external enforcers** that the apartment needed to ensure that we were making the pareto-optimal move to live in a clean apartment. What a great idea!

*that is, everyone living in the apartment
**they are technically not "external enforcers" as they are also living in the apartment, but they are trusted to do their part, and I am assuming away any corruption.