Team production and gift exchange

There are several examples of team production that I can think of that relate to at least one of the New York Times articles. The first example will be buying a gift for someone. In our family, it is expected that everyone buy a person’s birthday gift with their own money, or pay equal parts in a more expensive gift. This relates to the article about “sharing the marbles” and fairness, both in effort and reward. The effort in this example is the personal amount of money that an individual spends, while the reward is being able to claim that the gift came from you. There are times where one person will pay the full price of the gift but include everyone’s name in it, but this is done with the agreement that everyone else will compensate the buyer with what they would have payed had they all purchased it together. Although this is not the only time when team production occurs in my family.

Another instance of team production would be when my father, my brother and I all assembled a dresser from IKEA. All of us benefited from the construction: my brother and I get a place to put our clothes and my dad no longer has to deal with complaints about not being able to find our clothes or having them be put in his drawers. Then there are things like washing dishes and cleaning up after a meal. The rule at our house is that whoever cooks does not have to clean, thus relating back to sharing the marbles, albeit indirectly. Everyone contributes and everyone benefits, but the work is different. The reason why this functions in a household setting but fails in a larger economic setting because the difference in work is negligible and the act of cooking is something that can only be accomplished by my father.

That said, there are times when one person will do all the work despite it being unfair. This is not due to altruism, but rather because it is need. One example of this is when I end up doing the dishes. This is a necessity when there are no clean dishes, so I will do it all in order to get a personal benefit. That said, when I do end up doing the dishes myself, I am exempt from doing it the next time, tying back to fairness. I had done something without being asked that everyone benefited from, so it is only fair that they do the same job. Yet despite these examples, not every instance of team production aligns with the parameters in the articles.

There are instances where the benefits, or “marbles”, are redistributed to be equal despite one or more people not putting in any effort, or attempting to circumvent fairness at the expense of others. In the case of redistribution, many school projects award the same grade to all group members regardless of what they contribute. Comparing it to the marble example, it is like one person pulling the rope to get marbles while someone who did nothing gets the same amount of marbles just because they were with the first person. As for fairness, when my brother and I have to wash dishes together, we will often argue about who does what. Even though they are all steps within the same task, we place different values and preferences on them. These preferences overlap and this results in one of us doing the part that we both dislike while the other does the parts that we both prefer. We don’t care about fairness and do all the steps together, instead trying to shove the undesirable work off on the other.