I Swear We're Not That Messy.

I’ve lived with my roommates for over a year, and despite the substantial amount of time we spend together, collectively cleaning our apartment is the worst. Either we are too lazy, too busy, or unwilling to claim our mess. However, we prefer to keep a clean living environment. Since some of my roommates refuse to use a chore chart, how our apartment’s common spaces ultimately end up getting cleaned presents itself as a classic prisoner’s dilemma. 

The ultimate goal is to have clean common spaces in our apartment. We each have the choice between cleaning and not cleaning. Each of us has a dominant strategy: don’t clean and hope the other cleans up. The sub-optimal options would be for one person to clean and the other free ride on the results of the roommate’s cleaning. The Pareto Optimal solution would be for all of us to clean collaboratively, where even though we would have to put in effort, it would take less time and our apartment would be clean. However, we all expect someone else to do the work, and while we wouldn’t have to do the work (meaning higher utility), our apartment stays dirty (sub-optimal utility). 

This being said my roommates and I ironically hate a dirty living environment. Outside of this dilemma, we do end up cleaning our apartment, but rarely collaboratively. Our apartment ultimately gets cleaned, but at the sub-optimal utility levels where we all put in different amounts of effort. Maybe this year I can finally convince everyone to get the chore chart.