158 sats \ 5 replies \ @Undisciplined 3 Mar \ parent \ on: Let's talk bounties: what's an appropriate amount? meta
Ok, well I certainly can't guarantee that I would have come up with a valuable response, but I would have put some thought into it for a larger bounty.
There's something called "moral crowding out" in economics. It's about how sometimes putting a price on things that are normally regulated by social norms can actually reduce the behavior you want to incentivize.
Oh I can explain this.
I read this from a book. So a childcare centre faced the problem of parents arriving later than its closing time. Parents were suitably apologetic and said sorry profusely for keeping the staff waiting. Subsequently, the childcare centre decided to implement a policy in which parents who came late needed to pay a penalty. You would expect parents to shape up their behaviour, but ironically the problem grew worse. Parents felt justified in being late because now they were paying for the teachers’ time - regardless of whether the penalty did boost the staff’s salaries.
However, I got to say this penalty system works wonders in Singapore. Every evening, I rush to pick my children up before 7pm because I don’t want to pay the $5 penalty. I am typically the last one to pick up my children, so I’m sure my fellow parents also don’t want to pay unnecessarily haha. We Singaporeans very money/minded haha
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You nailed it.
I think part of the explanation was that the closing time was quite difficult for some parents to make and it was taking more than $5 worth of effort for them to get there.
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We don't know how common this phenomenon is and it may well not apply here, since our conversations are pretty heavily monetized already.
The most famous case comes from a study about an Israeli daycare. The daycare wanted to reduce how often parents were late picking up their kids, because it was very costly to the daycare to keep all the staff later than scheduled.
The daycare started fining parents something like $5 for being late. The result was parents being late far more often. The generally accepted explanation is that shame and not wanting to inconvenience anyone were replaced as motivations for the $5 fine and parents were perfectly happy to pay the $5.
The idea is that the daycare communicated that being late was only a $5 inconvenience for them and the parents had been assuming it was a bigger deal than that before the price was made explicit.