Team Production with Gift Exchange

 A New York Times article from 2012 looks at an experiment carried out with toddlers. The experiment involved a cup, some marbles and a length of rope. This experiment reveals a fundamental aspect of human nature: fairness. When the toddlers believed that a collaborative effort went into acquiring the marbles, they made sure to split the spoils evenly amongst themselves. It makes sense: if the work is evenly split, so too should the reward. Now the real world isn't as simplified as this little experiment. It's often difficult to know the division of labor and who contributed the most. The reward also may not be immediately evident or might be something that cannot be shared. Even with these complexities, this little experiment can help explain interactions between coworkers.

In many businesses, teamwork can take a backseat. Coworkers may all be contributing to the companies bottom line but they don't work together. An example of such a business would be an Investment bank. Investors work to earn as much profit for the company as they can. They're usually motivated by bonuses explicitly tied to their performance, as monitored by how much money they bring in. In this case, there is no incentive to help out coworkers. If you were to help one of your coworkers complete an investment, you would be helping the company and the coworker profit, but you personally wouldn't see any direct financial benefit. Therefore, that helpful interaction between you and a coworker would never happen. But what if you had the opportunity to make a deal but a coworker held some crucial part that would be necessary to complete the deal?

Imagine two business men in a meeting with a manufacturer of napkin dispensers. Businessman A has had a close relationship dealing with the napkin dispenser manufacturer for a while. He has brokered numerous deals for the manufacturer with restaurants in the area. Unfortunately, Businessman A has run out of restaurants and is struggling to find new business for the manufacturer. However, Businessman B works with Businessman A at the Napkin Middle Man Dispenser Company and B's father owns a whole chain of restaurants thats looking to upgrade their dispensers. Now B would like to just set up a deal for his father himself, but he can't offer dispensers at the price his father demands. Luckily, A is able to get cheap napkin dispensers from his napkin dispenser manufacturer guy. It seems like A and B should help each other out to complete the deal. However, the Napkin Middle Man Dispenser Company only allows one businessman to collect commission on each sale.

If we take a look back at the article, if these businessmen were the toddlers, they would have one of them collect the commission and then evenly distribute it amongst themselves. Lets assume each businessman put in the same amount of work to get their respective clients ready to make a deal. Like the toddlers, they would see that it took a collaborative effort to get the reward so the spoils should be shared. However this touches on a topic addressed in an earlier blogpost, opportunism. Opportunism basically describes someone taking advantage of a situation for their own benefit. It puts an ethical dilemma into consideration. Since there is no internal mechanism at the businessmen's company to split commission, one of the businessmen will gain the entirety of it. It would be in the personal interest of that businessman to keep the money for himself. He would lose the trust of the other businessman and possibly the company as a whole, but in the present, he would be better off. It would probably be a rare case that a sales company wouldn't be able to split commission among a team that worked to make the sale, but without that internal mechanism by a company, some sales may not occur due to lack of trust among coworkers. I think opportunism throws a wrench into the ideals of the experiment.