This article, written by Dreeve’s wife has displaced Yvain’s polyamory essay as the most interesting relationships article I’ve read this year. The basic idea is that instead of trying to split chores or common goods equally, you use auctions. For example, if the bathroom needs to be cleaned, each partner says how much they’d be willing to clean it for. The person with the higher bid pays the what the other person bid, and that person does the cleaning.
It’s easy to see why commenters accused them of being libertarian. But I think egalitarians should examine this system too. Most couples agree that chores and common goods should be split equally. But what does “equally” mean? It’s hard to quantify exactly how much each person contributes to a relationship. This allows the more powerful person to exaggerate their contributions and pressure the weaker person into doing more than their fair share. But auctions safeguard against this abuse requiring participants to quantify how much they value each task.
For example, feminists argue that women do more domestic chores than men, and that these chores go unnoticed by men. Men do a little bit, but because men don’t see all the work women do, they end up thinking that they’re doing their share when they aren’t. Auctions safeguard against this abuse. Instead of the wife just cleaning the bathroom, she and her husbands bid for how much they’d be willing to clean the bathroom for. The lower bid is considered the fair market price of cleaning the bathroom. Then she and her husband engage in a joint-purchase auction to decide if the bathroom will be cleaned at all. Either the bathroom gets cleaned and the cleaner gets fairly compensated, or the bathroom doesn’t get cleaned because the total utility of cleaning the bathroom is less than the disutility of cleaning the bathroom.
And that’s it. No arguing about who cleaned it last. No debating whether it really needs to cleaned. No room for misogynist cultural machines to pressure the wife into doing more than her fair share. Just a market transaction that is efficient and fair.
This sounds interesting for cases where both parties are economically secure.
However I can’t see it working in my case since my housemates each earn somewhere around ten times what I do. Under this system, my bids would always be lowest and I would do all the chores without exception. While I would feel unable to turn down this chance to earn money, my status would drop from that of an equal to that of a servant. I would find this unacceptable.
my housemates each earn somewhere around ten times what I do. Under this system, my bids would always be lowest and I would do all the chores without exception.
I believe you are wrong. (Or I am; in which case please explain to me how.) Here is what I would do it if I lived with a bunch of millionaires, assuming my money is limited:
The first time, I would ask a realistic price X. And I would do the chores. I would put the gained money apart into “the money I don’t really own, because I will use them in future to get my status back” budget.
The second time, I would ask 1.5 × X. The third time, 2 × X. The fourth time, 3 × X. If asked, I would explain the change by saying: “I guess I was totally miscalibrated about how I value my time. Well, I’m learning. Sorry, this bidding system is so new and confusing to me.” But I would act like I am not really required to explain anything.
Let’s assume I always do the chores. Then my income grows exponentially, which is a nice thing per se, but most importantly, it cannot continue forever. At some moment, my bid would be so insanely high, that even Bill Gates would volunteer to do the chores instead. -- Which is completely okay for me, because I would pay him the $1000000000 per hour from my “get the status back” budget, which at the given time already contains the money.
That’s it. Keep your money from chores in a separate budget and use them only to pay others for doing the chores. Increase or decrease the bids depending on the state of that budget. If the price becomes relatively stable, there is no way you would do more chores than the other people around you.
The only imbalance I can imagine is if you have a housemate A which always bids more than a housemate B, in which case you will end up between them, always doing more chores than A but less than B. Assuming there are 10 A’s and 1 B, and the B is considered very low status, this might result in a rather low status for you, too. -- The system merely guarantees you won’t get the lowest status, even if you are the less wealthy person in the house; but you can still get the second-lowest place.
Could one not change the bidding to use “chore points” of somesuch? I mean, the system described is designed for spouses, but there’s no reason it couldn’t be adapted for you and your housemates.
Wasn’t it Ariely’s Predictably Irrational that went over market norms vs. tribe norms? If you just had ordinary people start doing this, I would guess it would crash and burn for the obvious market-norm reasons (the urge to game the system, basically). And some ew-squick power disparity stuff if this is ever enforced by a third party or even social pressure.
Empirically speaking, this system has worked in our house (of 7 people, for about 6 months so far). What kind of gaming the system were you thinking of?
We do use social pressure: there is social pressure to do your contracted chores, and keep your chore point balance positive. This hasn’t really created power disparities per se.
What kind of gaming the system were you thinking of?
If the idea is to say exactly how much you are willing to pay, there would be an incentive to:
1) Broadcast that you find all labor extra unpleasant and all goods extra valuable, to encourage people to bid high
2) Bid artificially lower values when you know someone enjoys a labor / doesn’t mind parting with a good and will bid accordingly.
In short, optimal play would involve deception, and it happens to be a deception of the sort that might not be difficult to commit subconsciously. You might deceive yourself into thinking you find a chore unpleasant—I have read experimental evidence to support the notion that intrinsically rewarding tasks lose some of their appeal when paired with extrinsic rewards.
No comment on whether the traditional way is any better or worse—I think these two testimonials are sufficient evidence for this to be worth people who have a willing human tribe handy to try it, despite the theoretical issues. After all,
we trust each other not to be cheats and jerks. That’s true love, baby
Edit: There is another, more pleasant problem: If you and I are engaged in trade, and I actually care about your utility function, that’s going to effect the price. The whole point of this system is to communicate utility evenly after subtracting for the fact that you care about each other (otherwise why bother with a system?)
Concrete example: We are trying to transfer ownership of a computer monitor, and I’m willing to give it to you for free because I care about you. But if I were to take that into account, then we are essentially back to the traditional method. I’d have to attempt to conjure up the value at which i’d sell the monitor to someone I was neutral towards.
Of course, you could just use this as an argument stopper—whenever there is real disagreement, you use money to effect an easy compromise. But then there is monetary pressure to be argumentative and difficult, and social pressure not to be—it would be socially awkward and monetarily advantageous if you were constantly the one who had a problem with unmet needs.
1) Broadcast that you find all labor extra unpleasant and all goods extra valuable, to encourage people to bid high
But if other people bid high, then you have to pay more. And they will know if you bid lower, because the auctions are public. How does this help you?
2) Bid artificially lower values when you know someone enjoys a labor / doesn’t mind parting with a good and will bid accordingly.
I don’t understand how this helps you either; if you bid lower and therefore win the auction, then you have to do the chore for less than you value it at. That’s no fun.
The way our system works, it actually gives the lowest bidder, not their actual bid, but the second lowest bid minus 1; that way you don’t have to do bidding wars, and can more or less just bid what you value it at. It does create the issue that you mention—bid sniping, if you know what the lowest bidder will bid you can bid just above it so they get as little as possible—but this is at the risk of having to actually do the chore for that little, because bids are binding.
I’d very much like to understand the issues you bring up, because if they are real problems, we might be able to take some stabs at solving them.
whenever there is real disagreement, you use money to effect an easy compromise.
This has become somewhat of a norm in our house. We can pass around chore points in exchange for rides to places and so forth; it’s useful, because you can ask for favors without using up your social capital. (Just your chore points capital, which is easier to gain more of and more transparent.)
if you bid lower and therefore win the auction, then you have to do the chore for less than you value it at. That’s no fun.
You only do this when you plan to be the buyer. The idea is to win the auction and become the buyer, but putting up as little money as possible. If you know that the other guy will do it for $5, you bid $6, even if you actually value it at $10. As you said, I’m talking about bid sniping.
But if other people bid high, then you have to pay more.
Ah, I should have written “broadcast that you find all labor extra unpleasant and all goods extra valuable when you are the seller (giving up a good or doing a labour) so that people pay you more to do it.”
If you’re willing to do a chore for _$10, but you broadcast that you find it more than -$10 of unpleasantness, the other party will be influenced to bid higher—say, $40. Then, you can bid $30, and get paid more. It’s just price inflation—in a traditional transaction, a seller wants the buyer to pay as much as they are willing to pay. To do this, the seller must artificially inflate the buyer’s perception of how much the item is worth to the seller. The same holds true here.
When you intend to be the buyer you do the opposite—broadcast that you’re willing to do the labor for cheap to lower prices, then bid snipe. As in a traditional transaction, the buyer wants the seller to believe that the item is not of much worth to the buyer. The buyer also has to try to guess the minimum amount that the seller will part with the item.
it actually gives the lowest bidder, not their actual bid, but the second lowest bid minus 1
So what I wrote above was assuming the price was a midpoint between the buyer’s and seller’s bid, which gives them both equal power to set the price. This rule slightly alters things, by putting all the price setting power in the buyer’s hands.
Under this rule, after all the deceptive price inflation is said and done you should still bid an honest $10 if you are only playing once—though since this is an iterated case, you probably want to bid higher just to keep up appearances if you are trying to be deceptive.
One of the nice things about this rule is that there is no incentive to be deceptive unless other people are bid sniping. The weakness of this rule is that it creates a stronger incentive to bid snipe.
Price inflation (seller’s strategy) and bid sniping (buyer’s strategy) are the two basic forms of deception in this game. Your rule empowers the buyer to set the price, thereby making price inflation harder at the cost of making bid sniping easier. I don’t think there is a way around this—it seems to be a general property of trading. Finding a way around it would probably solve some larger scale economic problems.
There are two ways I know of that the market can try to defeat bid sniping, and one way a bidder can (that I know of).
Our system does not display the lowest bid, only the second lowest bid. For a one-shot auction where you had poor information about the others preferences, this would solve bid sniping. However, in our case, chores come up multiple times, and I’m pretty sure that it’s public knowledge how much I bid on shopping, for example.
If you’re in a situation where the lowest bid is hidden, but your bidding is predictable, you can sometimes bid higher than you normally would. This punishes people who bid less than they’re willing to actually do the chore for, but imposes costs on you and the market as a whole as well, in the form of higher prices for the chore.
A third option, which we do not implement (credit to Richard for this idea), is to randomly award the auction to one of the two (or n) lowest bidders, with probability inversely related to their bid. In particular, if you pick between the lowest 2 bidders, both have claimed to be willing to do the job for the 2nd bidder’s price (so the price isn’t higher and noone can claim they were forced to do something for less than they wanted). This punishes bid-snipers by taking them at their word that they’re willing to do the chore for the reduced price, at the cost of determinism, which allows better planning.
Plus, I think it doesn’t work when there are only two players? If I honestly bid $30, and you bid $40 and randomly get awarded the auction, then I have to pay you $40. And that leaves me at -$10 disutility, since the task was only -$30 to me.
To be sure I’m following you: If the 2nd bidder gets it (for the same price as the first bidder), the market efficiency is lost because the 2nd person is indifferent between winning and not, while the first would have liked to win it? If so, I think that’s right.
If there are two players… I agree the first bidder is worse off than they would be if they had won. This seems like a special case of the above though: why is it more broken with 2 players?
Yes, that’s one of the inefficiencies. The other inefficiency is that whenever the 2nd player wins, the service gets more expensive.
If there are two players… I agree the first bidder is worse off than they would be if they had won. This seems like a special case of the above though: why is it more broken with 2 players?
Because of the fact that the service gets more expensive. When there are multiple players, this might not seem like such a big deal—sure, you might pay more than the cheapest possible price, but you are still ultimately all benefiting (even if you aren’t maximally benefiting). Small market inefficiencies are tolerable.
It’s not so bad with 3 players who bid 20, 30, 40, since even if the 30-bidder wins, the other two players only have to pay 15 each. It’s still inefficient, but it’s not worse than no trade.
However, when your economy consists of two people, market inefficiency is felt more keenly. Consider the example I gave earlier once more:
I bid 30. You bid 40. So I can sell you my service for $30-$40, and we both benefit.
.
But wait! The coin flip makes you win the auction. So now I have to pay you $40.
My stated preference is that I would not be willing to pay more than $30 for this service. But I am forced to do so. The market inefficiency has not merely resulted in a sub-optimal outcome—it’s actually worse than if I had not traded at all!
Edit: What’s worse is that you can name any price. So suppose it’s just us two, I bid $10 and you bid $100, and it goes to the second bidder...
I don’t think that the service gets more expensive under a second price auction (which Choron uses). If you bid $10 and I bid $100, normally it would go to you for $100. In the randomized case, it might go to me for $100.
I think I agree with you about the possibility of harm in the 2 person case.
I don’t think that the service gets more expensive under a second price auction (which Choron uses). If you bid $10 and I bid $100, normally it would go to you for $100. In the randomized case, it might go to me for $100.
Oh yes, that’s right. I think I initially misunderstood the rules of the second price—I thought it would be $10 to me or $100 to you , randomly chosen.
What kind of gaming the system were you thinking of?
Yeah, bidding = deception. But in addition to someonewrong’s answer, I was thinking you could just end up doing a shitty job at things (e.g. cleaning the bathroom). Which is to say, if this were an actual labor market, and not a method of communicating between people who like each other and have outside-the-market reasons to cooperate, the market doesn’t have much competition.
Yeah, that’s unfortunately not something we can really handle other than decreeing “Doing this chore entails doing X and it doesn’t count if you don’t do X.” Enforcing the system isn’t solved by the system itself.
a method of communicating between people who like each other and have outside-the-market reasons to cooperate
Except she specifies that if they’re bidding above market wages for a task (cleaning the bathroom would work fine), they’ll just pay someone else to do it. Of course, chores like getting up to deal with a sick child are not so outsourceable.
Most couples agree that chores and common goods should be split equally.
I’m skeptical that most couples agree with this.
Anyway, all of these types of ‘chore division’ systems that I’ve seen so far totally disregard human psychology. Remember that the goal isn’t to have a fair chore system. The goal is to have a system that preserves a happy and stable relationship. If the resulting system winds up not being ‘fair’, that’s ok.
My roommate and I started doing this a year ago. It went pretty well for the first few months. Then our neighbor heard about how much we were paying eachother for chores and started outbidding us.
Then our neighbor heard about how much we were paying eachother for chores and started outbidding us.
This is one of the features of this policy, actually- you can use this as a natural measure of what tasks you should outsource. If a maid would cost $20 to clean the apartment, and you and your roommates all want at least $50 to do it, then the efficient thing to do is to hire a maid.
The problem could be that they actually are willing to do it for $10, but it’s a low-status thing to admit.
If we both lived in the same appartment, and we both pretended that our time is precious that we are only willing to clean the appartment for $1000… and I do it 50% of the time, and you do it 50% of the time, at the end none of us gets poor despite the unrealistic prices, because each of us gets all the money back.
Now when the third person comes and cares about money more than about status (which is easier for them, because they don’t live in the same appartment with us), our pretending is exposed and we become either more honest or poor.
I can see this working better than a dysfunctional household, but if you’re both in the habit of just doing things, this is going to make everything worse.
Very fair point! Just like with Beeminder, if you’re lucky enough to simply not suffer from akrasia then all the craziness with commitment devices is entirely superfluous. I liken it to literal myopia. If you don’t have the problem then more power to you. If you do then apply the requisite technology to fix it (glasses, commitment devices, decision auctions).
But actually I think decision auctions are different. There’s no such thing as not having the problem they solve. Preferences will conflict sometimes. Just that normal people have perfectly adequate approximations (turn taking, feeling each other out, informal mental point systems, barter) to what we’ve formalized and nerded up with our decision auctions.
And that’s it. No arguing about who cleaned it last. No debating whether it really needs to cleaned. No room for misogynist cultural machines to pressure the wife into doing more than her fair share. Just a market transaction that is efficient and fair.
The polyamory and BDSM subcultures prove that nerds can create new social rules that improve sex. Of course, you can’t just theorize about what the best social rules would be and then declare that you’ve “solved the problem.” But when you see people living happier lives as a result of changing their social rules, there’s nothing wrong with inviting other people to take a look.
I don’t understand your postscript. I didn’t say there is no inequality in chore division because if there were a chore market would have removed it. I said a chore market would have more equality than the standard each-person-does-what-they-think-is-fair system. Your response seems like fully generalized counterargument: anyone who proposes a way to reduce inequality can be accused of denying that the inequality exists.
The polyamory and BDSM subcultures prove that nerds can create new social rules that improve sex
The modern BDSM culture’s origins are somewhat obscure, but I don’t think I’d be comfortable saying it was created by nerds despite its present demographics. The leather scene is only one of its cultural poles, but that’s generally thought to have grown out of the post-WWII gay biker scene: not the nerdiest of subcultures, to say the least.
I don’t know as much about the origins of poly, but I suspect the same would likely be true there.
The polyamory and BDSM subcultures prove that nerds can create new social rules that improve sex.
Hmm, I don’t know that I would consider those rules overall to be clearly superior for everyone, although they do reasonably well for me. Rather, I value the existence of different subcultures with different norms, so that people can choose those that suit their predilections and needs.
(More politically: A “liberal” society composed of overlapping subcultures with different norms, in a context of individual rights and social support, seems to be almost certain to meet more people’s needs than a “totalizing” society with a single set of norms.)
There are certain of those social rules that seem to be pretty clear improvements to me, though — chiefly the increased care on the subject of consent. That’s an improvement in a vanilla-monogamous-heteronormative subculture as well as a kink-poly-genderqueer one.
(More politically: A “liberal” society composed of overlapping subcultures with different norms, in a context of individual rights and social support, seems to be almost certain to meet more people’s needs than a “totalizing” society with a single set of norms.)
This works best if none of the “subcultures with different norms” creates huge negative externatilies for the rest of the society. Otherwise, some people get angry. -- And then we need to go meta and create some global rules that either prevent the former from creating the externalities, or the latter from expressing their anger.
I guess in case of BDSM subculture this works without problems. And I guess the test of the polyamorous community will be how well they will treat their children (hopefully better than polygamous mormons treat their sons), or perhaps how will they handle the poly- equivalents of divorce, especially the economical aspects of it (if there is a significant shared property).
One datapoint: I know of one household (two adults, one child) which worked out chores by having people list which chores they liked, which they tolerated, and which they hated. It turned out that there was enough intrinsic motivation to make taking care of the house work.
Roger and I wrote a web app for exactly this purpose—dividing chores via auction. This has worked well for chore management for a house of 7 roommates, for about 6 months so far.
The feminism angle didn’t even occur to us! It’s just been really useful for dividing chores optimally.
I can see it working when all parties are trustworthy and committed to fairness, which is a high threshold to begin with. Also, everyone has to buy into the idea of other people being autonomous agents, with no shoulds attached. Still, this might run into trouble when one party badly wants something flatly unacceptable to the other and so unable to afford it and feeling resentful.
One (unrelated) interesting quote:
my womb is worth about the cost of one graduate-level course at Columbia, assuming I’m interested in bearing your kid to begin with.
This article, written by Dreeve’s wife has displaced Yvain’s polyamory essay as the most interesting relationships article I’ve read this year. The basic idea is that instead of trying to split chores or common goods equally, you use auctions. For example, if the bathroom needs to be cleaned, each partner says how much they’d be willing to clean it for. The person with the higher bid pays the what the other person bid, and that person does the cleaning.
It’s easy to see why commenters accused them of being libertarian. But I think egalitarians should examine this system too. Most couples agree that chores and common goods should be split equally. But what does “equally” mean? It’s hard to quantify exactly how much each person contributes to a relationship. This allows the more powerful person to exaggerate their contributions and pressure the weaker person into doing more than their fair share. But auctions safeguard against this abuse requiring participants to quantify how much they value each task.
For example, feminists argue that women do more domestic chores than men, and that these chores go unnoticed by men. Men do a little bit, but because men don’t see all the work women do, they end up thinking that they’re doing their share when they aren’t. Auctions safeguard against this abuse. Instead of the wife just cleaning the bathroom, she and her husbands bid for how much they’d be willing to clean the bathroom for. The lower bid is considered the fair market price of cleaning the bathroom. Then she and her husband engage in a joint-purchase auction to decide if the bathroom will be cleaned at all. Either the bathroom gets cleaned and the cleaner gets fairly compensated, or the bathroom doesn’t get cleaned because the total utility of cleaning the bathroom is less than the disutility of cleaning the bathroom.
And that’s it. No arguing about who cleaned it last. No debating whether it really needs to cleaned. No room for misogynist cultural machines to pressure the wife into doing more than her fair share. Just a market transaction that is efficient and fair.
This sounds interesting for cases where both parties are economically secure.
However I can’t see it working in my case since my housemates each earn somewhere around ten times what I do. Under this system, my bids would always be lowest and I would do all the chores without exception. While I would feel unable to turn down this chance to earn money, my status would drop from that of an equal to that of a servant. I would find this unacceptable.
I believe you are wrong. (Or I am; in which case please explain to me how.) Here is what I would do it if I lived with a bunch of millionaires, assuming my money is limited:
The first time, I would ask a realistic price X. And I would do the chores. I would put the gained money apart into “the money I don’t really own, because I will use them in future to get my status back” budget.
The second time, I would ask 1.5 × X. The third time, 2 × X. The fourth time, 3 × X. If asked, I would explain the change by saying: “I guess I was totally miscalibrated about how I value my time. Well, I’m learning. Sorry, this bidding system is so new and confusing to me.” But I would act like I am not really required to explain anything.
Let’s assume I always do the chores. Then my income grows exponentially, which is a nice thing per se, but most importantly, it cannot continue forever. At some moment, my bid would be so insanely high, that even Bill Gates would volunteer to do the chores instead. -- Which is completely okay for me, because I would pay him the $1000000000 per hour from my “get the status back” budget, which at the given time already contains the money.
That’s it. Keep your money from chores in a separate budget and use them only to pay others for doing the chores. Increase or decrease the bids depending on the state of that budget. If the price becomes relatively stable, there is no way you would do more chores than the other people around you.
The only imbalance I can imagine is if you have a housemate A which always bids more than a housemate B, in which case you will end up between them, always doing more chores than A but less than B. Assuming there are 10 A’s and 1 B, and the B is considered very low status, this might result in a rather low status for you, too. -- The system merely guarantees you won’t get the lowest status, even if you are the less wealthy person in the house; but you can still get the second-lowest place.
Could one not change the bidding to use “chore points” of somesuch? I mean, the system described is designed for spouses, but there’s no reason it couldn’t be adapted for you and your housemates.
Wasn’t it Ariely’s Predictably Irrational that went over market norms vs. tribe norms? If you just had ordinary people start doing this, I would guess it would crash and burn for the obvious market-norm reasons (the urge to game the system, basically). And some ew-squick power disparity stuff if this is ever enforced by a third party or even social pressure.
Empirically speaking, this system has worked in our house (of 7 people, for about 6 months so far). What kind of gaming the system were you thinking of?
We do use social pressure: there is social pressure to do your contracted chores, and keep your chore point balance positive. This hasn’t really created power disparities per se.
If the idea is to say exactly how much you are willing to pay, there would be an incentive to:
1) Broadcast that you find all labor extra unpleasant and all goods extra valuable, to encourage people to bid high
2) Bid artificially lower values when you know someone enjoys a labor / doesn’t mind parting with a good and will bid accordingly.
In short, optimal play would involve deception, and it happens to be a deception of the sort that might not be difficult to commit subconsciously. You might deceive yourself into thinking you find a chore unpleasant—I have read experimental evidence to support the notion that intrinsically rewarding tasks lose some of their appeal when paired with extrinsic rewards.
No comment on whether the traditional way is any better or worse—I think these two testimonials are sufficient evidence for this to be worth people who have a willing human tribe handy to try it, despite the theoretical issues. After all,
Edit: There is another, more pleasant problem: If you and I are engaged in trade, and I actually care about your utility function, that’s going to effect the price. The whole point of this system is to communicate utility evenly after subtracting for the fact that you care about each other (otherwise why bother with a system?)
Concrete example: We are trying to transfer ownership of a computer monitor, and I’m willing to give it to you for free because I care about you. But if I were to take that into account, then we are essentially back to the traditional method. I’d have to attempt to conjure up the value at which i’d sell the monitor to someone I was neutral towards.
Of course, you could just use this as an argument stopper—whenever there is real disagreement, you use money to effect an easy compromise. But then there is monetary pressure to be argumentative and difficult, and social pressure not to be—it would be socially awkward and monetarily advantageous if you were constantly the one who had a problem with unmet needs.
But if other people bid high, then you have to pay more. And they will know if you bid lower, because the auctions are public. How does this help you?
I don’t understand how this helps you either; if you bid lower and therefore win the auction, then you have to do the chore for less than you value it at. That’s no fun.
The way our system works, it actually gives the lowest bidder, not their actual bid, but the second lowest bid minus 1; that way you don’t have to do bidding wars, and can more or less just bid what you value it at. It does create the issue that you mention—bid sniping, if you know what the lowest bidder will bid you can bid just above it so they get as little as possible—but this is at the risk of having to actually do the chore for that little, because bids are binding.
I’d very much like to understand the issues you bring up, because if they are real problems, we might be able to take some stabs at solving them.
This has become somewhat of a norm in our house. We can pass around chore points in exchange for rides to places and so forth; it’s useful, because you can ask for favors without using up your social capital. (Just your chore points capital, which is easier to gain more of and more transparent.)
You only do this when you plan to be the buyer. The idea is to win the auction and become the buyer, but putting up as little money as possible. If you know that the other guy will do it for $5, you bid $6, even if you actually value it at $10. As you said, I’m talking about bid sniping.
Ah, I should have written “broadcast that you find all labor extra unpleasant and all goods extra valuable when you are the seller (giving up a good or doing a labour) so that people pay you more to do it.”
If you’re willing to do a chore for _$10, but you broadcast that you find it more than -$10 of unpleasantness, the other party will be influenced to bid higher—say, $40. Then, you can bid $30, and get paid more. It’s just price inflation—in a traditional transaction, a seller wants the buyer to pay as much as they are willing to pay. To do this, the seller must artificially inflate the buyer’s perception of how much the item is worth to the seller. The same holds true here.
When you intend to be the buyer you do the opposite—broadcast that you’re willing to do the labor for cheap to lower prices, then bid snipe. As in a traditional transaction, the buyer wants the seller to believe that the item is not of much worth to the buyer. The buyer also has to try to guess the minimum amount that the seller will part with the item.
So what I wrote above was assuming the price was a midpoint between the buyer’s and seller’s bid, which gives them both equal power to set the price. This rule slightly alters things, by putting all the price setting power in the buyer’s hands.
Under this rule, after all the deceptive price inflation is said and done you should still bid an honest $10 if you are only playing once—though since this is an iterated case, you probably want to bid higher just to keep up appearances if you are trying to be deceptive.
One of the nice things about this rule is that there is no incentive to be deceptive unless other people are bid sniping. The weakness of this rule is that it creates a stronger incentive to bid snipe.
Price inflation (seller’s strategy) and bid sniping (buyer’s strategy) are the two basic forms of deception in this game. Your rule empowers the buyer to set the price, thereby making price inflation harder at the cost of making bid sniping easier. I don’t think there is a way around this—it seems to be a general property of trading. Finding a way around it would probably solve some larger scale economic problems.
(I’m one of the other users/devs of Choron)
There are two ways I know of that the market can try to defeat bid sniping, and one way a bidder can (that I know of).
Our system does not display the lowest bid, only the second lowest bid. For a one-shot auction where you had poor information about the others preferences, this would solve bid sniping. However, in our case, chores come up multiple times, and I’m pretty sure that it’s public knowledge how much I bid on shopping, for example.
If you’re in a situation where the lowest bid is hidden, but your bidding is predictable, you can sometimes bid higher than you normally would. This punishes people who bid less than they’re willing to actually do the chore for, but imposes costs on you and the market as a whole as well, in the form of higher prices for the chore.
A third option, which we do not implement (credit to Richard for this idea), is to randomly award the auction to one of the two (or n) lowest bidders, with probability inversely related to their bid. In particular, if you pick between the lowest 2 bidders, both have claimed to be willing to do the job for the 2nd bidder’s price (so the price isn’t higher and noone can claim they were forced to do something for less than they wanted). This punishes bid-snipers by taking them at their word that they’re willing to do the chore for the reduced price, at the cost of determinism, which allows better planning.
And market efficiency.
Plus, I think it doesn’t work when there are only two players? If I honestly bid $30, and you bid $40 and randomly get awarded the auction, then I have to pay you $40. And that leaves me at -$10 disutility, since the task was only -$30 to me.
To be sure I’m following you: If the 2nd bidder gets it (for the same price as the first bidder), the market efficiency is lost because the 2nd person is indifferent between winning and not, while the first would have liked to win it? If so, I think that’s right.
If there are two players… I agree the first bidder is worse off than they would be if they had won. This seems like a special case of the above though: why is it more broken with 2 players?
Yes, that’s one of the inefficiencies. The other inefficiency is that whenever the 2nd player wins, the service gets more expensive.
Because of the fact that the service gets more expensive. When there are multiple players, this might not seem like such a big deal—sure, you might pay more than the cheapest possible price, but you are still ultimately all benefiting (even if you aren’t maximally benefiting). Small market inefficiencies are tolerable.
It’s not so bad with 3 players who bid 20, 30, 40, since even if the 30-bidder wins, the other two players only have to pay 15 each. It’s still inefficient, but it’s not worse than no trade.
However, when your economy consists of two people, market inefficiency is felt more keenly. Consider the example I gave earlier once more:
I bid 30. You bid 40. So I can sell you my service for $30-$40, and we both benefit. . But wait! The coin flip makes you win the auction. So now I have to pay you $40.
My stated preference is that I would not be willing to pay more than $30 for this service. But I am forced to do so. The market inefficiency has not merely resulted in a sub-optimal outcome—it’s actually worse than if I had not traded at all!
Edit: What’s worse is that you can name any price. So suppose it’s just us two, I bid $10 and you bid $100, and it goes to the second bidder...
I don’t think that the service gets more expensive under a second price auction (which Choron uses). If you bid $10 and I bid $100, normally it would go to you for $100. In the randomized case, it might go to me for $100.
I think I agree with you about the possibility of harm in the 2 person case.
Oh yes, that’s right. I think I initially misunderstood the rules of the second price—I thought it would be $10 to me or $100 to you , randomly chosen.
Yeah, bidding = deception. But in addition to someonewrong’s answer, I was thinking you could just end up doing a shitty job at things (e.g. cleaning the bathroom). Which is to say, if this were an actual labor market, and not a method of communicating between people who like each other and have outside-the-market reasons to cooperate, the market doesn’t have much competition.
Yeah, that’s unfortunately not something we can really handle other than decreeing “Doing this chore entails doing X and it doesn’t count if you don’t do X.” Enforcing the system isn’t solved by the system itself.
Good way to describe it.
Except she specifies that if they’re bidding above market wages for a task (cleaning the bathroom would work fine), they’ll just pay someone else to do it. Of course, chores like getting up to deal with a sick child are not so outsourceable.
I’m skeptical that most couples agree with this.
Anyway, all of these types of ‘chore division’ systems that I’ve seen so far totally disregard human psychology. Remember that the goal isn’t to have a fair chore system. The goal is to have a system that preserves a happy and stable relationship. If the resulting system winds up not being ‘fair’, that’s ok.
Most couples worldwide, or most couples in W.E.I.R.D. societies?
Both.
Wow someone else thought of doing this too!
My roommate and I started doing this a year ago. It went pretty well for the first few months. Then our neighbor heard about how much we were paying eachother for chores and started outbidding us.
This is one of the features of this policy, actually- you can use this as a natural measure of what tasks you should outsource. If a maid would cost $20 to clean the apartment, and you and your roommates all want at least $50 to do it, then the efficient thing to do is to hire a maid.
The problem could be that they actually are willing to do it for $10, but it’s a low-status thing to admit.
If we both lived in the same appartment, and we both pretended that our time is precious that we are only willing to clean the appartment for $1000… and I do it 50% of the time, and you do it 50% of the time, at the end none of us gets poor despite the unrealistic prices, because each of us gets all the money back.
Now when the third person comes and cares about money more than about status (which is easier for them, because they don’t live in the same appartment with us), our pretending is exposed and we become either more honest or poor.
I can see this working better than a dysfunctional household, but if you’re both in the habit of just doing things, this is going to make everything worse.
Very fair point! Just like with Beeminder, if you’re lucky enough to simply not suffer from akrasia then all the craziness with commitment devices is entirely superfluous. I liken it to literal myopia. If you don’t have the problem then more power to you. If you do then apply the requisite technology to fix it (glasses, commitment devices, decision auctions).
But actually I think decision auctions are different. There’s no such thing as not having the problem they solve. Preferences will conflict sometimes. Just that normal people have perfectly adequate approximations (turn taking, feeling each other out, informal mental point systems, barter) to what we’ve formalized and nerded up with our decision auctions.
P.S.: those last two sentences (“No room for misogynist cultural machines to pressure the wife into doing more than her fair share. Just a market transaction that is efficient and fair.”) also remind me of “If those women were really oppressed, someone would have tended to have freed them by then.”
The polyamory and BDSM subcultures prove that nerds can create new social rules that improve sex. Of course, you can’t just theorize about what the best social rules would be and then declare that you’ve “solved the problem.” But when you see people living happier lives as a result of changing their social rules, there’s nothing wrong with inviting other people to take a look.
I don’t understand your postscript. I didn’t say there is no inequality in chore division because if there were a chore market would have removed it. I said a chore market would have more equality than the standard each-person-does-what-they-think-is-fair system. Your response seems like fully generalized counterargument: anyone who proposes a way to reduce inequality can be accused of denying that the inequality exists.
The modern BDSM culture’s origins are somewhat obscure, but I don’t think I’d be comfortable saying it was created by nerds despite its present demographics. The leather scene is only one of its cultural poles, but that’s generally thought to have grown out of the post-WWII gay biker scene: not the nerdiest of subcultures, to say the least.
I don’t know as much about the origins of poly, but I suspect the same would likely be true there.
Hmm, I don’t know that I would consider those rules overall to be clearly superior for everyone, although they do reasonably well for me. Rather, I value the existence of different subcultures with different norms, so that people can choose those that suit their predilections and needs.
(More politically: A “liberal” society composed of overlapping subcultures with different norms, in a context of individual rights and social support, seems to be almost certain to meet more people’s needs than a “totalizing” society with a single set of norms.)
There are certain of those social rules that seem to be pretty clear improvements to me, though — chiefly the increased care on the subject of consent. That’s an improvement in a vanilla-monogamous-heteronormative subculture as well as a kink-poly-genderqueer one.
This works best if none of the “subcultures with different norms” creates huge negative externatilies for the rest of the society. Otherwise, some people get angry. -- And then we need to go meta and create some global rules that either prevent the former from creating the externalities, or the latter from expressing their anger.
I guess in case of BDSM subculture this works without problems. And I guess the test of the polyamorous community will be how well they will treat their children (hopefully better than polygamous mormons treat their sons), or perhaps how will they handle the poly- equivalents of divorce, especially the economical aspects of it (if there is a significant shared property).
One datapoint: I know of one household (two adults, one child) which worked out chores by having people list which chores they liked, which they tolerated, and which they hated. It turned out that there was enough intrinsic motivation to make taking care of the house work.
Roger and I wrote a web app for exactly this purpose—dividing chores via auction. This has worked well for chore management for a house of 7 roommates, for about 6 months so far.
The feminism angle didn’t even occur to us! It’s just been really useful for dividing chores optimally.
I can see it working when all parties are trustworthy and committed to fairness, which is a high threshold to begin with. Also, everyone has to buy into the idea of other people being autonomous agents, with no shoulds attached. Still, this might run into trouble when one party badly wants something flatly unacceptable to the other and so unable to afford it and feeling resentful.
One (unrelated) interesting quote: