If Everyone Picked Up a Piece of Trash

I was reading a New York Times piece answering frequently asked questions about climate change when I thought to myself about how many people, myself included, will pass trash on the sidewalk and just keep going.

Why don’t more people pick up trash on the street? It’s relatively easy to do, and you don’t even have to go out of your way – you’re likely to pass a trashcan wherever you’re headed. I thought maybe I could apply the Prisoner’s Dilemma theory to explain why someone wouldn’t.

If Person A and Person B both pick up the trash, they receive a payoff of 5 each. The world looks nicer and is cleaner because of their actions.

If one person picks up trash off the street, and the other one doesn’t, the person picking up the trash receives a payoff of 2, and the one who leaves the trash gets a payoff of 6. The reasoning here requires a bit of an assumption. The picker-upper receives a lower payoff because they are the one picking up trash in the world, but because they are doing so alone, there is still trash around. The picker-upper becomes frustrated despite his good action. The one who doesn’t pick up the trash benefits from seeing a partially cleaner world without having to do anything.

Finally, if neither person picks up the trash, they both receive a payoff of 3 because the world may not be as clean, but neither person is committing time to cleaning up the trash. Neither person loses anything from their inaction – except a damaged Earth.

Based on their payoffs, both players end up in the bottom-right square of 3,3 instead of the mutually superior square of 5,5. Litter laws sometimes prevent people from adding to trash on the street, but no one is at blame if they avoid picking up trash already in the environment. In order to get both Player A and Player B to pick up trash, some incentive would have to be made to force them to make a Pareto-optimal move to the top-left square.

New York City Switching to Ranked Choice Voting

As of the election day last Tuesday, New York City has switched to a Ranked Choice Voting system due to an overwhelming majority in the ballot. The margin by which the new system won with about 75% of the vote. This is interesting because I wonder how many voters were informed by this decision. As we have talked about in class, many people choose to be ignorant on different topics in life. As a person who did not vote, I was ignorant to any policies that were brought up in the voting booth. Moreover, the new system will have the voters rank each of their top 5 candidates. They will be joining about 20 other cities across the country as well as Maine in using this voting reform. As we have read in the textbook and experienced in class, ranked choice voting has a way better chance of choosing the correct candidate or Condorcet winner.

The opposition to this new voting system only argued that it would take more time to count up all the votes and eliminate the last place candidates. However a huge pro is that it will eliminate negative campaigning against fellow candidates, as well as making candidates catering to all voters because if one set of voters really does not like a certain candidate then they will get a lot of last ranked votes.

Ideally, the country would switch to this method because there would be plenty of elections in the past that could have had different results but since they had a loyal following they won a plurality vote. In the 2016 election, Hillary and Trump received less than 50% of the vote in 12 different states and a third party won the rest of the vote. It would have been interesting to see how the presidential election would have ended up especially after Hillary won the popular vote and lost the election due to plurality in states causing her to lose in the electoral college.

MinMax For Y.A.R.

Homecoming weekend at UVA means the Young Alumni Reunion. The Young Alumni Reunion event invites the three most recently graduated classes of UVA to celebrate UVA with friends and family. While this is one of my favorite events of the year because I get to see my old, graduated friends, there is the weighty decision of choosing to let my old, graduated friends to stay with me or not. While most would think it would be a selfish decision to not allow them to stay in my house, they are unaware of the fact that my older friends who have graduated are NOTORIOUS for destroying things to which they have no liability to, those things usually being the house which I live in and everything inside it. I had to use the minmax regret strategy when making this decision of whether or not to let my friends stay with me during this year’s Y.A.R.. The marginal cost of letting my friends stay with me would be me having to deal with their debauchery and the most-indefinitely event of them breaking something (which I would have to deal with in the future). On the other hand, the marginal benefit would include the great time spent reconnecting and reliving the days when they were back in college. I love my friends and would feel regret for not letting them stay with me in the off chance that they don’t break anything in my house. In but the end, I decided that the marginal benefit of letting my friends stay with me would outweigh the marginal cost of them breaking something, so I let them stay with me.

	State 1: Spending quality time with my friends at Y.A.R. where they don’t break anything	State 2: They mistreat the home I live in and my belongings.
Action 1: Let them stay with me	0	MC
Action 2: Don’t let them stay with me	MB - MC	0

While I seem to exaggerate the marginal cost of this decision, here is the proof of the marginal cost of the carnage from the older alums after this weekend.

Rational Voting at Chapter

This Sunday, my fraternity held elections for our executive positions. However, as I thought about our election, my mind went to Johnson’s rational abstention theory and I wondered if I even should vote. 

This election, or series of elections, is quite different from the one Johnson writes about. For this election, it is rational for one to vote. Looking at the basis for his argument, E[MB] < MC, I will show how it is, in fact, rational to vote. 

First, the expected marginal benefit side. As a fourth year, I will only have one semester with the new executive board, so the different utility I face from either candidate will be lower than others in the fraternity, but still measurable. As for the case my vote will be the deciding vote, the probability is low, but not nearly as low as a local, state, or national election. With 60 members of my fraternity, my expected marginal benefit is 1.66% multiplied by the difference in the utility I face from each candidate.

Second, the marginal cost side. As chapter is mandatory and I plan to attend every week, the cost I face attending chapter is negligible to this analysis as the costs are unchanged whether I vote or not. Also, as I already know Robert's Rules and voting is simply counted by raising a hand, I face no costs to the action of voting. 

Although the expected marginal benefit of voting is low, the marginal cost of voting is practically zero in this case. For chapter voting, E[MB] > MC and I decided to vote, in this case rationally. As it turns out, after a tie and further discussion, our new recruitment chair won in favor of my vote.

Principal-Agent Problem in HackCville

I am currently a Program Lead (PL) at HackCville — a company that teaches primarily UVA students different technical skills. A PL is essentially a teacher, and I am the PL for a course called Storyboard which teaches students the fundamentals of videography. HackCville has a Chief Operating Officer (COO) who pretty much runs HackCville and therefore acts as the "principal", and the PLs for all courses (including me) are considered the "agents".

Recently, I noticed that the COO kept pushing students to fill out mid-course feedback forms which asked them to evaluate the performance of their PLs and how much they're learning in their respective courses. I didn't understand why this was such a big deal to the COO until I realized that at HackCville, there exists a Principal-Agent Problem and he was trying to find a solution to it through these forms since customer (student) feedback is a way to evaluate employee performance. The COO's (principal's) main interest is to ensure that the company makes as much money as possible. This translates into him wanting all students learn a lot about the skill that the course they paid to enroll in is supposed to teach them so that, by the time courses end, the students feel like they learned a lot and want to recommend HackCville to their friends or sign up for another course, thus resulting in higher enrollment and therefore more profit for HackCville. The PLs (agents) however, have different interests. We don't really care about how much money HackCville makes and instead mostly care about having fun with our students and fellow PLs — not making sure that our students learn as much as possible about videography or other skills — which causes us to shirk by wasting teaching time by talking about random stuff with our students, letting our classes out early, etc. Because the PLs' (agents') interests do not align with those of the COO's (the principal's), there is a Principal-Agent Problem.

In order to guard against the PLs' shirking, the COO created these feedback forms. By having students fill out these forms evaluating our performances and course content, the COO was increasing his information by monitoring the PLs' job performances. From this information, the COO could determine which PLs were acting in his (principal's) interests and those who weren't. Simply knowing that the COO could now determine which of us were shirking instead of working automatically decreased our respective levels of shirking since we did not want to be fired. Along with these feedback forms, our COO has another tactic of guarding against PL shirking: short contracts. PLs only teach for a semester at a time, so they have to reapply to the position each semester if they want to continue teaching. By instituting these short contracts, the COO can determine in a short amount of time which PLs shirk the most and then can decide whether or not to re-hire them the following semester. This decreases PL shirking because PLs know that they have to prove that their interests align with those of the COO if they want to be re-hired, so they act accordingly by teaching as much material as possible so their students learn as much as they can, thus increasing profits for HackCville.