Gift Exchange

Pre-Post

For this week’s prompt, I feel the purpose if meant for us to relate an example that we have experienced with gift-giving and relate it to the three articles provided. The general consensus of the articles is that people are born with traits of fairness but those traits can be altered through economic incentives and can cause unfair situations to occur. In order to relate an example of gift-giving, I will define that situation that I have experienced then discuss how each prompt goes against the example provided. I hope to get a full understand of the example and why gift-giving can be effective in certain cases but also be counterproductive. I want to get more in-depth with the issues of gift-giving as they apply to incentivized models.

Post

When I was on my Co-Op at Ashland Chemicals, they had a plant safety incentive program to encourage workers to keep safety in mind at all times. Ever since they implemented the program in 2006 they have been incident-free about 13 years. For a plant to be incident-free for that long is a great accomplishment is the manufacturing industry since many plants end up have one or two large incidents every year or so. The way the incentive program worked was that you have to get 15 safety points a month for 1 prize and 30 safety points a month for 2 prizes, which was the cap of prizes you could get each month. Along with that, you would get an additional half-day of time-off every month you completed 30 safety points. At the end of each quarter if you get got 30 safety points for each month for the three months you would get a larger prize on top of the monthly prizes. The prizes each month were “chachkey” worth around $5-$10 each and the quarterly prized were worth around $30-$50. The way you would get safety points was through a list of various events that were considered to be improving the safety of the plant. Some of which were doing hazard analysis, endorsing people who did something that improved the safety of the plant, attends safety meetings, etc. I am not sure if this program was the reason why the plant did not have any incidents but it seemed to be loved by most of the workers, especially the operators. They seemed to love the “chachkey” as compared to the higher-level workers how did the program because of the extra time off they would gain. A lot of the points that were gained seemed to still be part of the mandatory job requirements for most of the workers like attending safety meetings and doing a pre-work hazard analysis.

At my time at Ashland, I remember one of the other Co-Ops would endorse me for doing something safe, and I also felt obligated to endorse him for doing something safe so we would meet the 30 points for each month. I feel like anyone who endorsed me for safety points, I felt obligated to endorse as well. When I endorsed someone out of the blue they would also endorse me a few weeks later for safety points. This train of thought is in line with the point made in the “Sharing the Marbles” article over sharing the wealth. Because there was work given to someone as a reward the other person felt the need to share that reward with an equal amount, in this case, the same safety endorsement which was worth 5 safety points. If the safety points were just given to me by my boss or the safety manager I would not feel obligated to return the favor because I do not view them as equals, I view them as higher-ups. Therefore, I feel like I have earned it based on my own safety precautions. If someone of similar status gave it to me I feel like they would want an endorsement in return, thus feeling obligated to give them one as well. I was kind of in collusion with other Co-Op as we would give each other endorsements each month and they were usually for very trivial not out of the ordinary safety things. This could indicate that some people in this program mainly cared about the prizes more than the safety aspect. But  I am not sure if it defeated the overall purpose of the program as it did cause people to focus on some safety issues.

One issue with this program was that some of the jobs had mandatory safety requirements so those people racked up all their points within the first week because some of the tasks were worth 15 points. An example of this was an engineer doing a hazard analysis of a process that took about 30 minutes to an hour to do and he would get half of his safety points for the month. This would give the engineer most of his point s and he would not feel obligated to endorse other people in the month because already got his points. This could relate to the article on “Altruism” since people could feel obligated to give points if endorsed but once they reach their points they become selfish and do not want to help others. This is an example of how incentives can force people to be selfish and not “waste” five minutes of their time to write an endorsement if they have all of their points for the week. You can also relate this to the articles on “Fairness and Game Theory for Children” do to the fact that with the endorsement system we expect to get the same amount of points and though people will engage. When people obtain their points in other ways they are less likely to engage. A way to fix this it to make all events the same amount of points, but that would defeat the purpose of prioritizing safety events. So overall it would be hard to fix the fairness of this point system. I do believe though, that this safety point system worked overall as it still forces workers to engage in safety at some level, whether it be low level or high level.