The Tragedy of the Commons: Working During Holidays and Why Thanksgiving Almost Didn’t Happen

I will never work during the Christmas holidays again. Not after what happened last year.

I was looking forward to the end of the year. A big deadline had passed, and my expected workload involved quantitative modeling, which was both manageable and enjoyable (this is nerdy stuff that I really like). Best of all, the office would be quiet since most people left for vacations.

With everything looking rosy, it seemed like I would be getting a mini-vacation too.

But my expectations started to change as the office emptied out. Although most projects were on hold, managers asked the leaving workers to find a backup worker who was in the office, just in case a client request arose. And that’s where I came in. I was assigned a good amount of backup work because I was one of two entry-level employees staying around.

As more of my peers left, I was slowly called upon by managers of various projects. The requests were small, like collecting data or researching documents. But the work added up, and it was not fun to work late-nights in an empty office. And I ended up not being able to manage all of it, as I ultimately had to work on New Year’s Day to wrap up the extra assignments.

In all of this, my work quality probably suffered because my mood and motivation were both impaired.

I do not blame any individual manager or coworker for my unpleasant experience. I could collectively blame all of them, but that is not fair either. I really blame the situation that I happened to fall into. Economically speaking, it’s really more of a tragedy than anything else.

The Tragedy of the Commons

What happened was that I ended up being a shared resource among many people who had incentive to get me to work.

Although each manager had legitimate and small requests, I was on the short list of options and chosen for lots of work. The collection of tasks caused me to feel overworked. In turn, my work quality suffered across the board. If the situation had escalated, I might have gotten so angry that I would quit my job. (I’m exaggerating for illustration–I would not leave my job because of a short burst of work).

This example illustrates a game theory concept called the tragedy of the commons. The term applies to any situation where a commonly shared resource gets overused to the detriment of all players, like how overfishing can deplete a pond of fish. The tragedy is that each participant means well, but the collective actions damage a valuable resource.

There are many applications of the tragedy of the commons–here’s a great blog post about many of them.

But my favorite example involves Thanksgiving.

The First Thanksgiving

John Stossel explains the tragedy of the commons in this interesting article (thanks Glenn):

Because of sharing, the first Thanksgiving in 1623 almost didn’t happen.

…

When the Pilgrims first settled the Plymouth Colony, they organized their farm economy along communal lines. The goal was to share everything equally, work and produce.

They nearly all starved.

Why? When people can get the same return with a small amount of effort as with a large amount, most people will make little effort. Plymouth settlers faked illness rather than working the common property. Some even stole, despite their Puritan convictions. Total production was too meager to support the population, and famine resulted. Some ate rats, dogs, horses and cats. This went on for two years.

Oh, this is too juicy. Pilgrims stealing? Eating rats and dogs? Where was this information during my U.S. history class?

But we know that the Pilgrims ultimately came up with a solution:

The people of Plymouth moved from socialism to private farming. The results were dramatic.

“This had very good success,” Bradford wrote, “for it made all hands very industrious, so as much more corn was planted than otherwise would have been. … By this time harvest was come, and instead of famine, now God gave them plenty, and the face of things was changed, to the rejoicing of the hearts of many. … ”

Because of the change, the first Thanksgiving could be held in November 1623.

What Plymouth suffered under communalism was what economists today call the tragedy of the commons. But the problem has been known since ancient Greece. As Aristotle noted, “That which is common to the greatest number has the least care bestowed upon it.”

About the Solution

As Stossel’s example illustrates, the tragedy is a result of improper incentives. Under sharing, good land can be wasted because no one has reason enough to care for it. Under self-interest, good land will be efficiently used and preserved. And by extension of the invisible hand, the whole economy will coordinate to use the resource efficiently.

Stossel explains that property rights were the necessary tool to induce self-interest for the Pilgrims.

What is the analogy to work in the office?

On the job, my quality work output is the shared resource among managers. Property rights would amount to me being assigned solely to a specific manager and only taking work from that person. That manager would make sure that I am taken care of to maximize my work output during my employment.

I applaud that my office tried some version of property rights. The people I worked most closely with on big projects–my peer mentor and my managers–tried to preserve my work balance and work quality.

But they were overruled when others requested work and no one else was around. There is no practical way to implement and enforce a “work property right” in an office setting where workers will need to be shared.

Unfortunately, this means the tragedy of overwork will continue during the holidays for those that stick around. So if you are stuck in the office during the holidays, I wish you the best and hope you are not called to fill-in for too many people.

I’ll send you my regards in a postcard–from my vacation, of course–since the office is the last place I will be.



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  • Raymond Lui

    I haven’t sent out an email about taking a vacation for Christmas. Perhaps I need to in order to avoid your tragedy that I may have ended up repeating.

  • http://www.mindyourdecisions.com/blog Presh Talwalkar

    @Raymond Lui: Yes! I suggest you get on that quickly ;)

    In all honesty, I’m not saying my situation will repeat, but you are leaving that possibility open.

  • Erik

    Wow, why didn’t anybody tell Lenin, Mao, and co. about the Pilgrims? They might have avoided the problems the nascent USSR and PRC dealt with in feeding hundreds of millions of people.

  • http://www.mindyourdecisions.com/blog Presh Talwalkar

    Erik, good point.

  • Clyde Smithson

    Tragedy of the Commons? More like Tragedy of not being able to say NO. Sounds to me like a lot of whining. It was not the situation to blame it was you to blame because you chose not to control the situation.

    Prior planning prevents poor performance. A common flaw of most highly motivated and competent people is not only that they don’t say NO enough, but they never even give themselves a chance by properly scheduling their own time. Then a NO is not a NO. You should have placed task prioritization squarely back on your managers and co-workers in the context of accomplishable workload. My recommendation for next year is that you plan slots in your schedule and as requests come in slots are filled. When you reach capacity start saying NO by asking for prioritization. But you must have a good grasp of how long it really takes you to do a task. Sure your requesters may want to negotiate level of effort, but you should have put some slack in your estimate. Of course, you should always leave room to support the important (to you, your career) people. In my business, I routinely get piled on by the customer. I simply take the task list and draw a line where our resources end and then ask the customer for his priorities. But you better have good metrics to substantiate your position while showing the customer value (do you think I do?).

    Another game you could play here is how do you prioritize the tasks? By when the request came in, how important the task is, how important the requestor is, what is the value of the task to you, etc. But don’t blame the situation. It is neither unique, nor is it necessisarily seasonal. Or try the Kobashi Maru test, change the rules.

  • http://www.mindyourdecisions.com/blog Presh Talwalkar

    @Clyde Smithson: Thanks for the detailed reply.

    For starters, yes, I admit that I’m whining. Please, don’t take me too seriously :) The work I described was not even the most work I ever did–it was just a time when I had a lot more than I expected.

    I like your suggestion of placing it back on managers. I once read that new people should never say “No”–when in doubt, you should shoot the priorities back at the manager and let them tell you what to do. I agree.

    On the other hand, I was unexpectedly put in the position of taking on more work. There really were few people working. So even if I thought I was working a lot, I would have had no choice. It’s more of a theoretical consideration.

    But I agree that successful people find ways to prioritize tasks. And I never heard of the Kobashi Maru test–thanks for pointing that out.

  • Clyde Smithson

    Sorry, did not mean to make it personal. I’m showing my age. Kobiashi Maru is an old Star Trek reference. It is a simulation in which an officer candidate is put in a no-win, no-draw situation, regardless of the action he/she takes. It is intended as a psychological test. Kirk does not accept a no-win situation so he changes the rules (reprograms the computer). The point being that we as individuals usually have much more control of the rules of the game than we think:
    1) Sun Tzu – The Art of War (an amazing little book). Chapter 1 of the Samuel B. Griffith version. Ralph D. Sawyer provides another translation – both are good in their own way. You were in a situation where the weather was known but you let the “opposition” choose the terrain and in that sense lost. Briefly, the five fundamental factors: “The first of these factors is moral influence; the second, weather; the third, terrain; the fourth, command; and the fifth, doctrine.” The weather, roughly speaking is the condition that many people were taking the holiday off – out of your control. However, the terrain could have been better chosen based on your resource – your time. “By terrain I mean distances, whether the ground is traversed with ease or difficulty, whether it is open or constricted, and the chances of life or death. Mei Yao-ch’en: . . . When employing troops it is essential to know beforehand the conditions of the terrain. Knowing the distances, one can make use of an indirect or a direct plan. If he knows the degree of ease or difficulty of traversing the ground he can estimate the advantages of using infantry or cavalry. If he knows where the ground is constricted and where open he can calculate the size of force appropriate. If he knows where he will give battle he knows when to concentrate or divide his forces.”
    2) Or as Tim Connors puts it – Living Outside-In vs. Inside-out. “Living inside-out means taking responsibility for your quality of life, successes, failures, achievements, outcomes, risks, happiness, financial position, lifestyle, relationships, etc. People who live outside-in turn the responsibility for their happiness, success, and failures over to someone or something outside of themselves. They blame the weather, government, their spouse, the economy, their company or organization, where they live, their parents—the list goes on and on.” (ref. 91 Mistakes Smart Salespeople Make)

    But back to game theory, I think that this is more of a variable-sum game masquerading as a constant-sum game rather than a tragedy of the commons situation. I look at it this way. For sake of argument, let us say that you work in a pool of 20 individuals that produce 20 units of work if working 100% efficiency. To simplify for now, let us also assume that each individual is equivalent and that all units of work are equivalent. In a real case you would have grades of individuals and difficulty levels of work such that you could set up a matrix to map how different individuals perform on each type task – I might call this each individual’s efficiency at each task type. In a constant-sum game 20 people produce 20 units. If ten people leave the game then 10 people produce 20 units, or less work is produced. Where do the extra units come from? There is no game board in this case, so they can only come from 10 people working twice as hard. So what this really appears to me to be is a variable-sum game in which the output should reduce from 20 to 10. Now we can play some games that might match the work place more closely. For example, in most project management planning a person is rarely considered to be more than 80% efficient because of interruptions that do not tangibly contribute to work (ie. meetings). So in reality, the 20 people were producing about 16 units of work. And more often efficiency is down to 60% or lower. But let’s say that you work at 80%. When all the bosses leave there are no meetings so you can work 100%, a 25% increase. So now 10 people can produce 10 units of work, and therefore to get back 16 units of work the remaining individuals must work an additional 60% at 100% efficiency. Not likely. So the situation was very predictable from the outset. Now the managers may have thought they had de-scoped the work level but I bet that they did not coordinate to match their requests to the staffing level. But let’s say it got knocked down to 12 units of work (I don’t for a minute assume that they asked for less work than capacity); everyone would still have had to work 20% more at 100% efficiency. Since you did accomplish your tasks in your article, you ended up setting an expectation with the management that that was a reasonable work load (managers being very Pavlovian will then continue to work you like a dog).

    By the way, while I am not an economist, I do work in a heavy duty engineering analysis group that is a flat organization with highly matrixed work load. From a metric standpoint we went most of last year with the “fiction” of many people being tasked at above 1.0 man-level effort. My management routinely had me at 1.6 to 1.8, and folks working for me at similar levels. We attacked this by improving our individual efficiencies some (I would guess maybe 10%, and mostly gained by eliminating or reigning in meetings that tended to be open-ended – analysts love to talk) but mainly by measuring our own metrics to provide realistic workload levels. In our case we were constrained from new hiring and effectively constrained from working extra hours. Although many did to a small extent – working 10% more is vastly different than working 50% more. This did not really gain anything for us as the workforce had already been doing this so it was accounted for already – but we were able to point it out in the metrics. I now assign people to tasks for x number of hours per week and that plus the total effort determine schedule. Which we continually have to game. So I feel your pain. BTW, great site keep up the good work.

  • Mahesh Vallampati

    I was in a similar situation a couple of times and the lesson I learnt was this.
    “The easiest way to get set up for failure is to do two things. Don’t define an expectation and change it all the time.”

    Go back in your past and think about when you got set up for failiure and you will know.

  • http://www.mindyourdecisions.com/blog Presh Talwalkar

    @Clyde Smithson: Responses like yours are great since it reminds me how people actually think about problems. Economists are famous for living in a sheltered bubble of theory, and that’s why this blog is great to keep me grounded :) I like your analysis.

    @Mahesh Vallampti: Good point.

  • Clyde Smithson

    Well, we engineers live in our own bubbles. It’s just a different reality. What you’re doing in the blog is what I love about economics – look at why people do things and how from a systematic viewpoint. Three thought provoking (and fun) books that should be on everyone’s reading list:
    Freakonomics – Steven Levitt
    Genome – Matt Ridley
    Blink – Malcolm Gladwell
    And don’t assume because it is a book that it is correct. Make up your own mind.

  • http://www.mindyourdecisions.com/blog Presh Talwalkar

    @Clyde Smithson: Thanks for the encouragement, and thanks for sharing the books. I have read Freakonomics, was planning to read Blink, but Genome is a new one. I’ll add it to my reading list :)

  • Mahesh

    I actually had to endure the Kobiashi Maru test in my first job interview in 1992. This was for a sales job selling computers back home in India. The company was known for its aggressive sales tactics. So the test was as follows.
    “You are in front of the customer. This is a big deal. You have been told by your management that you will lose your job if you lose the deal. Also you will lose your job if you agree to an un-approved discount on the price. You are in a meeting with the customer and your competitor is waiting outside. The customers says that he is going to decide only on price and that the competitor is going to give a discount he is looking for and he is going to make a decision immediately. He asks you to make a decision on the discount immediately. And BTW, no calling your management on the cell phone or use the customer phone to call your boss”. I did pass the test and got the job..I will post in a couple of days my answer.

  • Erik

    OK, just to be completely pedantic, it’s spelled “Kobayashi Maru.” It’s the same name Keyser Söze’s associate took in “The Usual Suspects.”

  • http://www.mindyourdecisions.com/blog Presh Talwalkar

    Mahesh, that’s a great story and a good resolution :) I am looking forward to your answer.

  • http://www.mindyourdecisions.com/blog Presh Talwalkar

    Erik, since you dropped the word pedantic, I have a blog suggestion for you. It’s called “Pure Pedantry”–it’s a science blog and is excellent:

    http://scienceblogs.com/purepedantry/

  • Clyde Smithson

    I stand corrected. Here’s how it went down on Star Trek. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xDE8pjiCnSw

  • http://www.mindyourdecisions.com/blog Presh Talwalkar

    @Clyde Smithson: Nice–thanks for the link.

  • Mahesh

    The answer to the sales test.
    A couple of “valid” assumptions.
    I am going to assume that my competitor cannot offer un-approved discounts either to make the game fair.
    Another assumptions is that I am purely selling a commodity and the customer cares only about price. I have had some sales people say that they will offer something which is an intabgible extra which cannot be measured and so are having and developing personal relationships whatever that means.
    I am also assuming that the customer can delay the decision.
    The customer is going to make the decisions purely on price.

    Given that, here is the solution. The only way out here is to extend the end game and have the customer delay the decision making. The customer is being offered a discount by your competitor. What you can do to extend the end game is to offer a bigger discount than your competitor but at the same time request more time to get approvals. Since the customer is buying a commodity and is going to make a decision purely based on price, then the bigger discount you are offering should be attractive enough for the customer to delay the decision and for you to go get the approvals. You can then go back to your management to get the bigger discount and make the sale and keep your job. Another benefit of this strategy is that you will have get an idea of what discounts that you are competitors are offering to their customers which is valuable information for sales management. It would be even better if the customer documented that expectation instead of a verbal statement. The bigger discount you are offering should carry that caveat of documenting the price expectation by the customer which could benefit your management.
    You would make a good “agent” for the “principal” by finding that discount percentage in a careful manner by calibrating it down slowly instead of doing it steeply. You can then get some kind of committment that the customer will cease negotiations and make the deal happen and not play a “Race to the Bottom”.

    I did get the job…

  • http://www.mindyourdecisions.com/blog Presh Talwalkar

    @Mahesh: Nice answer. I like that the answer combines all sorts of game theory concepts: finding out your competitor’s strategy, delaying action, and getting commitment. Well done.

  • Mahesh

    As I go back in time in the Spring of 92, the answer was more by instinct, intuition and gut feel than an analysis as described above and Nash was on the verge of receiving the Nobel Prize. One book that really sharpened my thinking was “How do you move Mt. Fuji?” by William Poundstone. I read a couple of more of his books and I am better off for it. Strongly recommend reading his books.

  • http://www.mindyourdecisions.com/blog Presh Talwalkar

    @Mahesh: Your answer sounds like what Gladwell describes in “Blink”–a snap decision (a book I read because of reader Clyde Smithson above).

    Wow, thanks for the William Poundstone recommendations. I skimmed the summaries and there are like 4 books I want to read from him now.

    This makes me realize that I’m going to have to come up with some formal way that readers recommend books to me; I’ve gotten so many good suggestions already.

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