A Good, Old-Fashioned Chore Chart

I live in an apartment with four fantastic roommates. However, some of us are more prompt to clean than others. Last fall, it became apparent that a couple roommates bore the majority of the cleaning duties while the others did very little. But, despite this unequal distribution of duties, every roommate benefitted equally from the clean apartment. Those roommates who acquired the costs of cleaning didn’t reap any more benefit than the ones who didn’t take on cleaning costs.

We were suffering from the classic problem of free riding on a public good! In this situation, the clean apartment can be classified as a public good since it is non-excludable and non-rival in consumption. No roommate can be prevented from enjoying the benefits of a clean apartment and one roommate’s enjoyment of the cleanliness doesn’t detract from another’s enjoyment of it. Essentially, the cleanliness of the apartment provides significant positive externalities. 

Because some cleaned and others failed to participate in cleaning while still enjoying the benefits of the clean apartment, our home was consistently under-cleaned. The amount of cleaning we undertook clearly fell below the allocatively efficient level. The cleanliness level was not socially optimal. 

We scratched our heads, wondering if we’d need to call in the power of the state. Fortunately, my roommate Rachel, who had a slightly higher demand for this public good than the rest of us, decided to develop a private method of combatting our free-rider problem. She hearkened back to the elementary school days of sticker charts, and chose to create our very own chore chart. She listed five cleaning tasks, listed several weekends, and posted this chart in the kitchen. 

Rachel then showed it to us and said that we could sign our initials every time we completed a task. She also specified that each roommate should complete one task a weekend in order to evenly distribute the work. By establishing this system, she unwittingly tapped into the “warm glow” solution Gruber describes in his chapter on public goods. Now, we could see and quantify each person’s contributions. Because of this, we were all incentivized to clean more than we had before. Because we have a small, stable community within our apartment, we were able to mitigate this free rider problem by establishing group mores and exerting positive peer pressure. No need to strain our apartment’s social fabric with outside intervention! Rachel introduced a solution from the inside!