In addition to the extensive
"community service" and "academic assistance" that Greek life
definitely provides, one of the primary benefits of being in a fraternity is the ease of access to parties. In a sense, these events are a public good to fraternity members; they are non-rival, as the attendance of one brother doesn't affect another's ability to attend, and they are non-excludable, as brothers cannot really be kept from attending, given that members either live in the house in which they are thrown or know the door code needed to enter.
Unfortunately, like many public goods, these parties suffer from a free-rider problem. This is because people are reluctant to help plan them, since they can still receive social benefits as long as others in the fraternity pay the cost of doing so. In this case, the cost of producing parties is attending weekly chapter, as these meetings are the main forum through which event planning takes place. Because each individual's dominant strategy is to skip chapter (as demonstrated by the payoff matrix below), a sub-optimal number of people show up, which leads to an under-provision of parties.
According to Mueller, small groups can move from a Pareto inefficient outcome (the highlighted quadrant in this matrix) to a Pareto efficient one (the top left box) through the use of social pressure to encourage cooperation. This, however, has been unsuccessful for my fraternity, as people are hesitant to exclude or shame their best friends for their simple absence at weekly meetings. In order to overcome this failure, we are instead going to establish a formal sanction system in which people who miss chapter are required to clean up after parties. I hope that this improves attendance, but I also worry, as Mueller would, that this intervention might harm individuals' intrinsic motivation to contribute to the fraternity. For example, people who don't want to clean may just start skipping even more chapters and become even more distant from the fraternity. Over time, they may stop caring if we throw parties and may not feel guilty about leaving behind a dirty house (so much for brotherhood!).
2 comments:
Hi Andrew. I really enjoyed your post! I definitely have noticed the free rider problem emerge when it comes to planning and cleaning up parties. I am wondering, however, if it is accurate to identify parties as non-excludable. Since lists and bouncers help many groups restrict parties at UVA for liability purposes, could they not keep free-riders from attending your parties? In this case, Buchanan's theory of clubs could solve your problem by only allowing people to attend parties if they attended chapter. Still, I think you were correct to identify the risks of using social pressure to push people to a Pareto-efficient position. If people value their time too much to attend chapter, they might also value their time too much to clean. Perhaps it would be more successful to instead fine people for skipping chapter, so that if people are unwilling to clean, they at least could fund a cleaning service. Good luck with this problem!
Paige, thanks for the reply! I definitely understand your argument about the excludability of parties, and it was something that I was debating in my head while writing my post. My general thought process was that lists and bouncers are effective for non-members, however they may not work as well for people within the chapter. First, the use of lists and bouncers on our members would likely be very unpopular and may cause internal conflict that is even worse of a problem than sub-optimal chapter attendance. This, in turn, may cause members to distance themselves even further from the chapter, as they might become frustrated that, even after going through the pledge process and paying dues, their simple failure to attend weekly meetings is preventing them from benefiting from the fraternity. I also struggled to think of a way to exclude people who live in the house that we have parties, as there is nothing really stopping them from just leaving their rooms. In short, there are certainly ways that we could enforce the excludability of parties, but they seem like they would cause some in-fighting within the fraternity that would not be worth it or would possibly lead to some form of physical altercation.
As for fines, that is something that we have also considered and may eventually implement if cleaning is hard to enforce. Our biggest concern, though, is that people may make no effort to pay the fines that they accrue, so (unless we sue them, which seems too drastic of a measure to take over a failure to attend chapter meetings) that punishment may not be particularly effective, either.
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