Thursday, October 19, 2017

Wonderful friends, but free-riding roommates

I currently live with two of my closest friends here at UVA, and they are quite wonderful young women. My only grievance with them is that they free-ride off of my high standards of cleanliness. While we each have our own room and I have my own bathroom (don’t know what my mental stability would be like if I didn’t), we also have a lovely kitchen, dining room, and living room, all of which are very inviting thanks to our collective decoration efforts. None of us have desks in our rooms, thus we all do work in the common spaces. I view these spaces as public goods shared amongst the three of us, as we can’t exactly close the door to the kitchen or dining room to prevent others from coming in.

A clean home is a happy home. Individual efforts to keep it orderly and clean bestow group benefits. However, my roommates have exhibited a reluctance to contribute voluntarily to such benefits. There have been multiple times where I have had to delegate tasks for them to do: start and then unload the dishwasher; take out the trashcan that is now overflowing because I tried waiting to see if they’d take it out on their own; and wiping all of the crumbs, flour, and oil off of the counters, as we all cook pretty much every day. Though it means that they get to enjoy the benefit of a beautifully clean home without contributions equal to mine, the private benefits it brings me outweigh the costs of my individual time it takes up to not only pick up my own messes, but theirs as well. 

Though I've accepted the situation for what it is, I don't believe this is too much to ask. 

Alas. 

1 comment:

Louis Lemos said...

In order to get your good-for-nothing roommates to help you clean, you can employ some of Gruber's ideas of when a private market can overcome the free rider problem.

To try to emit a warm glow effect from your roommates, perhaps you can give them a gold star each time they clean!

You can try to get your roommates to become more altruistic. Remind them how stressed you've been recently and how much you love a clean house. Maybe they'll care about you again!

It appears the reason your living situation is currently working is also able to be taken from Gruber. You simply care more than others.