Mommy Martha and Her Free Riders

    I live in a house with 5 girls. We are all really good friends and living together has been a blast, but cleaning the house is not. We have assigned days that each of us cleans the kitchen and bathrooms, and every once in a while we will have a "power hour" of cleaning where we vacuum the floors, straighten up the pillows, etc. Overall we are pretty tidy people. However, one of my roommates, Martha, is very tidy. Her room is pristine. Martha is always tidying us and putting things away in the house, and has gotten the endearing nickname "Mommy Martha". While we all do out assigned jobs, Martha does much more. She vacuums everyday, cleans pans that are left in the sink, makes sure that every surface in the house is clear and cleans. 

    This is a class example of the free rider problem. We all want the house to be clean and tidy, but my roommates and I know that Mommy Martha will do the work if we don't. We lose the incentive to work because either way we will have a clean house. This creates a market failure in our house because the cleaning (the goods) is unevenly and inefficiently distributes. To fix this market failure in our house, I found this article on empoweringparents.com. This article helps outline some techniques to encourage children to do their chores. The free rider problem would not be as much of an issue if my roommates and I had greater incentive to do our chores. Who know if Mommy Martha will start paying us to clean our dishes and make our beds, but it would definitely fix me being a free rider.