Hacker News Reader

Comment by ThrustVectoring | Hacker News Reader

Paying money if you fail is counterproductive for actually getting things done. You're now allowed to fail, it just costs money. There's a case study I remember of a daycare that tried to get parents to show up on time by fining those who picked their kid up late; late pick-ups actually increased afterwards.

View on HN

Beeminder has written a lot about this. The daycare fine needed to be higher. Beeminder starts at a $5 fine and roughly triples with each consequent failure. Everyone is willing to fail until the consequence hits their limit, and then the behavior changes. I don’t know about Stikk, but Beeminder has a premium feature that lets you skip the cheaper fines and go straight to the big ones so you can start changing your behavior sooner. I’m guessing the daycare’s fine was timid and had no mechanism to ratchet up to each parent’s pain point.

The problem with the daycare was that parents began seeing it as "I can leave my child later, it just costs more" and they were just paying an additional fee to keep their child longer at a service they were already paying for. The daycare ended up removing the fee and the late pick ups stayed.

Yes, that makes sense. The fine changes the consequence to something that can be rationally weighed. Too low and people willingly pay it, so it needs to be higher. Automatic fine increases allow the fine to be customized to each parent so all of them eventually stop being late.

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.

I think this is a horribly bad idea. Daycare caretakers are the most loving and caring people I know. Putting them in a position where they have to argue with 3x richer people about hundreds of dollars is going to stress them out and needlessly strain the parent-caretaker relationship. I also can't imagine that's good for the child.

That may be. In this case, the daycare is just an example of how inflexible financial consequences could work better or worse depending on the implementation.

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.

This problem can be solved by hiring a professional who doesn't interact with the children to do the arguing, assuming there is enough money on the table to make that worthwhile.

(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.

Instead of thinking in a punitive manner (fines, shaming, etc) they could, for example, hire babysitters, charge the parents a good bunch and even thank them.

This reminds me of my local library. For every book one day late, you pay the equivalent of $0.05.

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.

Worse, some libraries cap the fine. So the fine per day decreases the longer you keep the book. This is mitigated by collections reporting to credit, but the threat of collections is the kind of vague consequence that people disregard or misvalue.

That was in Freakonomics. http://freakonomics.com/2013/10/23/what-makes-people-do-what...

but that's a different problem. parents are already accountable to the daycare to pick up their kids, and the payment enabled them more flexibility and actually reduce the accountability. we are paying an after-school service for exactly that purpose.

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.

> parents are already accountable to the daycare to pick up their kids

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 think we actually agree, but use different terms or definitions to mean roughly the same thing. i am accountable to someone to fulfill an obligation. otherwise it would not be an obligation.

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.

> In the absence of consequences, they are obligated but not accountable to the daycare.

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.

i had just that in mind when thinking about unspoken consequences.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com