Sunday, November 13, 2016

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 6th grade and my sister was in 3rd 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.




               

6 comments:

  1. Oy vey! You aren't the first one to write about family relations for this prompt, but that should be out of bounds. I did like your first sentence about diplomats and negotiators. I wonder if you might have found an example based on that. For example, at our university right now President Killeen is trying to negotiate through to us having a real budget from the State of Illinois. He certainly has pressures on him from multiple sources.

    I for one, wouldn't be happy if the campus had a published commitment to a graduate rate of x%. (You can choose what x should be.) I like to retain discretion about failing students I think are not performing well enough. If I got pressure from above to pass everyone in the class, I would push back at that.

    But legislators in Springfield view U of I productivity by how many students graduate. So there is a triangle, no doubt about it. I didn't expect you to choose this one, but I did want to show that it should not be too hard to come up with examples outside the family context.

    ReplyDelete
  2. This post is really interesting to me. It was kind of fun to learn about the little game between you and your sister. And I liked that you seeing you and your sister’s behavior of hiding for each other as a repeated prisoner’s dilemma, that’s really a vivid prisoner’s dilemma example in real life.

    ReplyDelete
  3. This comment has been removed by a blog administrator.

    ReplyDelete
  4. Professor Arvan can you tell me why this is out of bounds? No one was harmed in this; when I left home I would go over my friends' houses or play sports at the park. I think siblings of different ages face this fairly often, especially when they do not want to do what their parents want. I found myself as the negotiator, and so long as I could satisfy both parties, I could do as I pleased. The challenge was finding what was really important to me, and I realized I did not mind doing extra chores so that my parents did not complain, and my sister had my back. As far as President Killeen's negotiations, pushing too hard in favor of the students/faculty could get him in trouble with a board of directors, but not pushing hard enough could get him in trouble with the people who he represents.

    ReplyDelete
  5. I really liked hearing about your experience of doing chores with your sister. Since I have two younger brothers, I have lived through a somewhat similar situation of being the oldest and most in charge. My brother who was only two years younger than me always did his fair share of the work, but our youngest brother always tried to sneak away to the TV or computer until we convinced him to come back. Even then, he would only work for about five more minutes before sneaking back the the TV.
    As an agent to both your parents as your younger sister, you had some choices to make. Would you still have let your sister get away with doing less work if you hadn't been going to your friends' houses? Sometimes, when I was at home doing chores with my brothers and couldn't get my youngest brother to contribute, I would call one of my parents to tell them what was going on so that they could have a talk with him and convince him to do more work.

    ReplyDelete
  6. This is an interesting view of the complex relationships in families that I never got as an only child. It's interesting to think of families as having an organizational "hierarchy" of their own. You definitely had a principal-agent dilemma on your hands when you were balancing your relationship with your parents with that with your sibling. I wonder if you thought of any other ways that you could have resolved the triangle? Maybe you could have bartered with your sibling for less work on your part in exchange for a share of your allowance? Was your sister's lack of household work the only thing she wanted to hide from your parents? Maybe you could have placed another secret of hers on the table to give yourself more bargaining power? Did your sister go to her friends' houses at all?

    Even though I am an only child, there was still somewhat of a principal-agent dilemma in my own home growing up, except my nanny was the agent at the center. My parents had a certain amount of time that they wanted me to practice piano for. My nanny was in charge of supervising this, but preferred to let me fall slightly short of my parents' piano practice expectations in exchange for my being better-behaved and quieter around the house than I would be if she didn't have my piano practice to bargain with. In this case, she served one principal slightly less (my parents, who wanted her to supervise me in exchange for her salary) to help her relationship with the other "principal" (me, who would be a more easily cared for child in exchange for less piano practice time.)

    ReplyDelete