The Couple That Pays Each Other to Put Kids to Bed

This is just the first one I've heard of where there's a frigging ledger.

"Daddy, why don't you want to put me to bed?" and "Daddy, why do you pay Mommy more to put me to bed than Timmy?"

Edit: to address your subsequent update... "there has somehow spread the attitude that "being an adult" means that you have to do life's unpleasant-but-necessary chores, and make no attempt to alleviate their unpleasantness."

There is NOTHING that can alleviate the unpleasantness of changing a blow-out diaper or dealing with a feverish, vomiting child at 3am.

But in reference to the article in question: would this system work for you? If not, isn't there a chance it really won't work for these people, for the same reason?

I'm pretty confident it wouldn't work for my wife and I. If you're completely spent at the end of the day, do you really want to lose a bidding war with your spouse to do some extra work? Doesn't one party risk building resentment merely because they're the poorer in the relationship?

And what does this look like to the kids after a while?

I agree completely with your point that communication is hard. I just think that this "solution" is merely beautiful fondant covering a possibly shaky foundation; money should never be a long-term or routine motivator in a loving relationship.

In technical terms, it's a quasilinear utility function[0], where preferences are linear in money.

[0] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quasilinear_utility

I guess the danger is if you start to worry that the debt will never actually get repaid. But that doesn't seem like a worry right now. We'll come up with payments plans and whatnot if it ever does. We do use a 6% interest rate on that balance, which seems steep at current market rates, but not so much so that Bethany would want to transfer Beeminder equity to me to pay it off.

So I guess no tips on how to actually orchestrate something like this. Last year we had our biggest press coup just by having our phone number at the bottom of beeminder.com. Southwest Airlines inflight magazine called us after trying and failing to find a number for our competitor, GymPact.

I guess that's the real tip here: be so crazy that journalists seek you out. :)

You mean, could a roommate of theirs work as a live-in maid?

In that article, she mentions in passing the general case. From this, it seems like it would totally work with three people.

  There are n participants, each with some share — i.e., 
  some fraction — of a decision. Everyone submits a sealed bid, 
  the second highest of which is taken to be the Fair Market 
  Price (FMP). The high bidder wins, and buys out everyone else’s 
  shares, i.e., pays them the appropriate fraction of the FMP.

My biggest question is how to handle this when the household has a single source of income.

0: http://messymatters.com/autonomy/

Also, what is the value to her to experience the process of having a baby? Ubber-rich women still have their own babies, so there would appear to be a value in the experience.

This is essentially how my partner and I have divided up housework -- the person whose requirements for "done" are a superset of the other's does the chore. Fortunately we're fairly balanced in that regard.

Also, assuming both partners are working roughly equally, I don't think it is fair to split the household contributions based on money earned. eg. If I'm a software developer making $150,000 and I'm married to a teacher who is making $50k and we both work full-time, it makes no sense for me to expect her to contribute 2/3rd more effort at home -- her job is probably more stressful, draining and in most ways "harder" than mine.

But I think you'll probably have to permanently redistribute wealth within your relationship or else I can imagine it breeding resentment. Cashflow is going to make a bigger difference in all the little disputes that will grow into bigger disputes.

Or you could apply an inflation multiplier on your respective bets adjusted to the ratio of your respective incomes - but then the exercise may become moot as it renders it as less simple dispute settling mechanism.

At the end of the day, you still have to apply some psychology above and beyond your auction market - the article concludes with

>Recently Danny and Bethany haggled to see if he would drive her home after a long day of work or if she would have to ride her bike. She bet $15, and he intentionally "lost," so that he could do her the favor.

:P

Rather than everyone being happy, this (historically) ends rather more often in bloody revolution.

Personally, I believe that one rarely understands other people, and has no chance of understanding other people's relationships, so I'm disinclined to say that this is a bad idea. It's your relationship and I hope it works out well for you. But if anyone I knew told me that this is how they were operating, I'd have a hard time staying friends. Intimate relationships (romantic and otherwise) are based on releasing control and making compromises, and taking an accounting of everything in this way indicates not that you're being fair, but that you're not actually in a "relationship" per se.

I might have to concede that the whole thing is untenable unless you actually enjoy geeking out about the game theory and mechanism design and whatnot.