It's a Sunday afternoon, and the house is a mess. After all, that's what one would expect after 18 guys have been living there for a few weeks. A mass text is sent out: "House clean in 5 minutes." Thirty minutes later, the once filthy house is sparkling clean and most of the guys in the house are feeling pretty content with the results of their work cleaning the house. However, not everyone is satisfied. This is because while a majority of the house members participated willingly in the cleanup, a few decided to take the 'time to clean' text as their opportunity to leave the house. This resulted in a classic free-rider problem. Those who did not clean the house knew that the house would be clean with or without their efforts, which may have been why they chose not to participate. As a result, the guys who did clean had to put in more work, while the guys who did not clean were able to enjoy the product of others' labor without putting in any of their own efforts. This could potentially lead to fewer people cleaning in the future, as they see that others will do their work for them. This will result in both disgruntled members of the house who do participate and also potentially a failure to clean the house at all as more and more guys decide it's not worth their time and effort to participate because everyone else is skipping out on the job.
My proposed solution to this problem is to provide incentives to work, or in this case, disincentives to not clean. Our house should make a rule that if you do not show up to the house cleans in the future, that is ok, but you will simply have to pay those who do a small sum of money to compensate them for their extra work. This will be an efficient solution as those who value their money over whatever else they might be doing will help clean the house, and those whose opportunity cost of participating is too high will compensate everyone else for their share of cleaning.
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