I live in a house with eight other people here in Charlottesville. While this makes rent very cheap and days very action-packed, it also leads to a lot of dirty dishes. Divvying up this godforsaken chore is one of the greatest sources of animosity in the house and is quite literally, the worst. Dishes are an economical nightmare in my house. Those who have the lowest private marginal cost (not caring about dirty dishes in the sink), produce the most dirty dishes, while those with the highest private marginal cost (caring deeply about having an empty sink), produce the least dirty dishes. This results in a massive negative production externality where my sink is normally full, to my detriment, even though I wash all my dishes.
With equal property rights to the sink, am I entitled to a clean sink or are others entitled to a dirty sink? We knew dishes had to eventually become clean so a few members of the house produced a weekly dish schedule system where everyone washed all the dishes once a week (with the exception of two members/free-riders with meal plans who never used the sink), because everyone washing their own dishes "just wouldn't work". In this system, the sink remained full throughout the day, with nobody having any incentive to wash their own dishes, knowing somebody else would do it for them at the end of the day. Furthermore, knowing the kitchen would just be cleaned the next day, it was easy for those who didn't care as much about a clean sink to skip out on cleaning the dishes on their day and leave it for the next guy, leading to a detrimental free-rider problem.
This problem continues to plague my house, with variations between washing own dishes and having a schedule. So here I humbly ask all of you economists to help me come up with a solution to this predicament.
Best,
Nick Cummings
1 comment:
Dear Nick,
I found your reflections to be remarkably pertinent to recent events my own house has gone through. The sink space is over-exploited because of its common or open-access resource properties. For better or for worse, my house's solution resembled a government authoritarian crack-down, with no dishes allowed to be left in the sink for any amount of time for any reason. This solution was derived from distrusting house members to act responsibly without strict regulation. Should you not have the ability to take an approach like ours, perhaps labeling individuals dishes could be valuable. From there you could establish a cap on how many dishes each individual can have at the sink at one time, below the current polluters output. While this may not completely eliminate the problem, it would reduce quantity to be closer to allocative efficiency. In this entire situation, the efficient level of pollution may unfortunately differ from the outcome you want, where pollution (dishes in sink) is zero.
Best,
Cooper
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