To avoid setting bad incentives, i.e. that your boss still wants you to succeed, he personally should get a bonus out of the X even though the company earns less.
bossasaservice is about voluntary accountability where there previously was none. and it's fully in my control on how i use it.
part of the point of being a freelancer (or entrepreneur) is that i get to decide what i am accountable for and what not.
In the absence of consequences, they are obligated but not accountable to the daycare.
> and the payment enabled them more flexibility and actually reduce the accountability.
No, it replaced ethical obligation (which, insofar as it is accountability, is accountability to self) to defined-consequence accountability to the daycare, which in practice negates ethical obligation in favor of transactional accountability.
How that works out in price depends on the weight of the ethical rule involved for the individual vs the weight of the assigned consequence; it is counterproductive where you replace a strong ethical obligation with a weak consequence.
People often overlook that other people have ethics; that's actually useful self-protection in many situations, but it backfires when you undermine common ethics in an effort to create incentives and manage to replace it with weaker incentives than the target audience had from ethics in the status quo ante.
i don't believe in an absence of consequences. there are always consequences, even if they are not spelled out. sometimes we just don't know what the consequences might be. so at least i need to assume there are consequences unless it is explicitly said that there are none, at which point the obligation disappears.
however this is getting philosophical now, and strays from the topic.
I think it's beautifully HN-libertarian of you to consider "no financial consequences" equal to "no consequences".
Our daycare solves this with peer pressure and stern looks and it's super effective.
It doesn’t really matter if the parents see the fine as “a fine” or an unaffordable, automatically billed service if it’s priced right.
That said, if lateness is a problem, it’s impeding on the workers’ personal lives, which can’t be good for anybody, so I don’t mind exploring how those workers could be helped. I assume more upfrontness from the business office, and parent education, would go a long way, similar to other institutions.
(I mean, I agree it's a big problem. I also dislike haggling, and I think I would have done much better had i outsourced that function when I ran a business, even if I paid a lot to that person)
All that said, a sufficient guilt trip might be more effective than a fine in any case, and is something that a caretaker could probably provide.
If I am late to give back a book that I am still reading, I do not mind giving it back one or two weeks late after I am done with it.
The fine is actually considerably cheaper if you compare with the upfront cost to be able to use the library.
If you fail, you pay the charity an amount Y. If you succeed, you could do nothing, or give the Boss a bonus of .5Y for being a good boss
The perverse incentive has to land somewhere; not sure there's a way to neutralize this one. But it's an interesting idea.
Edit: read the second part of your original comment which clarified this. Perhaps the charity idea circumvents the wrong way risk altogether.
For instance say I don’t like Donald trump. If I fail my money goes to trumps reelection fund. But if it succeeds it goes to a charity that buys malaria nets for poor communities around the planet.
At the end of the day, that's what's happening anyway. As in, why continue the service if it's not working.
The incentives are already set so I am willing to pay (more) for successful management, and they will get paid (more) for successful management.
You get what you pay for. Why pay for failure?
You should want to avoid the payment! Is the short version. If you _only_ paid when you failed, you might go out of your way to not fail, if it meant you could avoid the payment.
Especially as a conditioned response -- eg. planning to fail sometimes. You won't mind losing $5 once in a while, if most of the time you aren't failing as a result. It's no fun if you're paying the $5 every time. But it's no fun if you're failing at your goals every time, either.
Failed once, failed twice, still paying $5? Why not up the commitment? How much will it take to get you to not fail next time, $20? $400? Or give up on that goal, once and for all. It's quite a weird system, but there is a lot of behavioral science behind it, and you will benefit by becoming better at predicting your capacity for important things, and planning. (Sure, you don't need Beeminder to do that, but it's a system for it...)
There are a lot of ideas around the psychology of getting things done from Beeminder and friends. Like the legend of Murder Gandhi, you have to read this one for yourself: https://blog.beeminder.com/schelling/
[1]: https://blog.beeminder.com/psych/ [2]: https://blog.beeminder.com/punishment/