Shirking

When I first heard this "technical term" in my Econ. 110 class, I was skeptical. Is this really worthy of being discussed in an economic class, or does it belong in Business Management 450? But at its root, shirking is based on the idea that everyone is self-interested (the basis of my economic beliefs) and that they will shirk, if given the chance. And the ideas behind correcting and preventing shirking are amusing, so...why not? Let's talk about shirking!

First off, shirking occurs whenever there is a team working together toward some output. Like, say, a group project in school or roadside litter cleanup. Because the output of the entire GROUP is measured, and not the contribution of each individual member, there is an opportunity to slack off and not be detected (or punished).

This is the classic story for why firms are organized hierarchically. You have a group of workers (people who do actual work, say manufacturing cars). Then there are another group of people - a tier above them - who are hired just to watch other people work (these are called managers). They don't do actual work; they just watch people work and yell at shirkers. Then, there is another tier of people above them who are hired to make sure the managers are watching the workers (and not shirking in their watching duties). And so on and so forth until you get to the CEO who doesn't need someone to make sure he doesn't shirk because his bonus schedule is tied directly to his performance, and since he's just the one guy it's easy to measure whether or not he's shirking.

Okay, so that works well for Ford and GM, but what about the lowly college student who's stuck on a group project with 3 other students. The group must prepare some sort of output to give to the teacher to be graded. The teacher gives all the members of the group the same grade. How do you police and enforce effort? Simple - by doing what college students do best: nagging, fighting, coercing eachother through rude emails and simple peer pressure. This is probably the most ineffective (and least interesting) solution to shirking, in my opinion.

A more interesting shirking solution was developed by the LDS church in regards to missionary work (and credit is due to Professor Kearl for first explaining this to me in Econ. 110). Missionaries are 19-21 year old men who are encouraged to go out in the world and do missionary work. There are currently about 52,000 missionaries serving, and they are paired up into 2's and 3's so that at any one time, there could only be a maximum of 26,000 doors being knocked on. There must be a reason for this duplication of effort, right? Yep - shirking. Mission Presidents know that if they sent missionaries out to work alone, they'd all sneak off to the movie theaters. So, they pair up the missionaries and send them out together. Then the MPs tell the missionaries to get to know their companion and be nice to them - LOVE your companion, they say. (But secretly, they don't want you to get to be too good of friends, because then you will conspire together to shirk!) So the Mission President tells you to write him a private letter once a week TATTLING on your companion! And to prevent you from becoming good enough friends with your companion so that you conspire to stop tattling, there is an ingenious system called TRANSFERS wherein they randomly mix up the companionships every 6 weeks so that you don't have time to become good enough friends to agree to shirk together.

Don't get me wrong - shirking is great...if you can get away with it. :)