Big Brother

To me, it seems like diplomats and negotiators are inclined  to face a triangular principal- agent dilemma. As the eldest child, I served as an agent for my parents when it came to accomplishing tasks around the house. When I was in 6^th grade and my sister was in 3^rd grade, my parents bought me a pre-paid flip phone so they could communicate with my sister and me to help with the coordination rides to and from sporting events. Presumably, they also wanted to teach me to be responsible and allow me what a lot of my friends had, a cell phone. Both of my parents had recently earned promotions at their jobs and were home less during the day. They expected me to be able to convince my sister to chores and act as their voice, but my word did not hold the same weight as theirs. At the same time, I was still a child and the agent for my sister and me. I was rarely ever able to convince my parents that their requests were unreasonable, but from time to time I could reduce the amount of work that we had to do, which made my sister and I better off in those moments.

My sister was (is) really lazy. My dad often called about an hour before he left work, telling me a few things that he would want us to do before he got home. Usually it was preparation for whatever he wanted to cook. In the beginning, I split the work evenly because I thought that was the fairest thing to do. I was honest with my sister about everything that my father said and she waited until the last possible moment to do everything. I ended up doing a lot of her work because I knew that if she didn’t do her half, I would be held responsible.  The next few times, not only did I split the responsibilities unevenly, but also, I gave myself less jobs. Eventually, my sister caught on to me doing the less time consuming jobs, so she complained to me and threatened to tell our parents.

 Again, I had to change my strategy, because I didn’t want to do more work or have my parents find out that I was doing less. Next, I started understating to my sister how much time was left until my father got home. She still waited until what she thought was the last minute, but she could get it done without my help because she had extra time. After a while, she realized that I was giving her less time than she had, so she just started doing things later. I complained about her behavior to her, but did not report it to my parents. Sometimes when my parents weren’t home, I would go over my friends’ houses, which was against their orders. I feared that if I told on my sister, she would tell on me.

Even though I was unhappy, I was participating in an unspoken quid pro quo agreement with my sister. If I did more work, she stayed quiet. In this situation, my parents were the ultimate authority, but I found myself better off by being in cahoots with my sister. Both my sister and I were faced with moral hazard, and I think we found ourselves in a repeated prisoner’s dilemma as well. It would be simpler to report each other’s “illegal” behaviors to our parents, but we wouldn’t be able to do what we wanted as much. Also, more strict rules would have been placed upon us if we told on each other, making us both worse off. The illusion of fairness regarding chore allocation was all that my parents needed, so as we grew older, my sister and I resolved issues of shirking on our own, even after we both got cell phones.