26.5: Chapter Exercises
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- 95273
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Chapter Exercises
- Suppose you are working on a group exercise in class, and that your personal grade for the project will be identical with the grade earned by your group. But part of the work for the project requires that each person spend some time gathering information in the library before the next meeting, when the group will complete its project.
Is there an assurance problem in this setting? Is there a danger of free riders in this setting? To what extent do the features of this situation mirror the problems involving public goods (go through the conditions for a public good one by one)? To what extent are they different? What measures might minimize the problem of free riders?
- Explain why each of the following is a public good. How might people try to take a free ride, enjoying its benefits without contributing, and how might this be prevented?
- population control
- protecting the environment against pollution
- preventing inflation
- various public health programs like immunization
- public education
- In the chapter on groups, we examined social loafing (24.2). How is social loafing related to free-riding? In what ways are they different? In what ways are they the same? What ways of fostering group cohesiveness decrease free-riding?
- When Chris Swoyer moved to Norman, there was a shortage of apartments, and prices were high (at least they seemed high to him). Many builders noted the shortage and began construction of new apartment complexes. In a few years, there were too many apartments; landlords had to maintain vacant apartments, and many offered to lower rents to entice people to stay. They would have preferred a situation where the apartments were all filled and rents were higher. Why didn’t this happen? Is this a Prisoner’s Dilemma? If so, why; if not, why not?
- Owners of professional football teams might impose salary caps because they cannot trust themselves to stick to an agreement to pay lower salaries. Can you think of other situations like this? We sometimes vote to have taxes to support government activities or dues to support an organization. In what ways is this like the owners’ use of salary caps.
- You live in a large house with a group of other people. All of you would prefer a clean house to a messy one, and if each of you cleaned up the mess you made, the house would be clean. But the house is large, and if only one person cleans up their mess, the house will remain almost as messy as if they did nothing. As a result, no one ever seems to clean up anything. How might you use each of the four measures discussed above (26.3) (coercion, setting things up to yield rewarding social by-products, prudence, and moral principles and ideals) to do this. Which of the four do you think would be most effective? Which least?
- You have been hired to promote more energy conservation in the state of Oklahoma. How might you use each of the four measures discussed above (coercion, setting things up to yield rewarding social by-products, prudence, and moral principles and ideals) to do this. Which of the four do you think would be most effective? Which least?
- You have been hired as a consultant to a project promoting population control in an over-populated developing country. Your thoughts here will have to be somewhat tentative, since you don’t know the culture, but your co-workers do. How might you use each of the four measures discussed above to do this? Which of the four do you think would be most effective? Which least?
- Tensions have been mounting between two nuclear super powers. They have become increasingly distrustful of each other, and each now fears a surprise attack. In high level meetings in both countries, the defense ministers argue that the only sensible option is a quick, surprise strike of their own. What reasoning might those in the meeting go through at this point? What might be done to avert the worst outcomes?
- Over-fishing of various areas has dramatically depleted the number of fish in local waters. In what ways does this situation resemble the Tragedy of the Commons? Can you think of any other contemporary counterparts of the Tragedy of the Commons?
- Why should we vote?
- We began with a simple game that has implications for many social situations. We’ll conclude with another game called ‘chicken’. It is named after the game where two people (mostly teenage males) drive their cars straight at each other and the first one to swerve out of the way is a chicken; there is a gripping depiction of this game in the movie Rebel without a Cause. In Figure 26.5.1, each person prefers a to b to c to d. Can you say what these outcomes amount to?
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- Describe what a, b, c and d stand for in a standard game of chicken.
- The structure of this game differs from the Prisoner’s Dilemma. Here we hope to get the other person to cooperate (swerve first) by trying to convince them that we will not cooperate. What real life situations exhibit the structure of this game?
- What dilemmas and traps can such situations generate?