Team production and gift exchange

Two developmental psychologist, Michael Tomasello and Katharina Hamann from Leipzig, Germany created a scenario in which three years old children can get rewards—marbles by pulling ropes on a machine, and they may be better off by engaging in gift exchanging and team work. There are three conditions of the study, the first one is that when two children pull their ropes together, one of the children gets 3 marbles, and the other gets 1. In this case, about 75% of time children would equalize their marbles. In the second condition, two children receive diffrent number of marbles, and one have three times more marbles than the other. In this case, few “rich” children would give their marbles to “poor” children. In the third condition, children still need to pull ropes to get marbles, one get three for every pulling, and the other only one. This time two children do not have to pull the rope together to get marbles, but they can just pull their own ropes for marbles, and 30% of children would equalize their marbles in this case. The author used this example to demonstrate that in economics people should focus more on procedural fairness instead of distributive fairness.

A relevant example I think of is me and my roommate.  I’m a better cook, so I’m the one who usually cook in my apartment, and my roommate usually do the dishes. In this case, my roommate does the dishes to exchange for a better-cooked meal, and I could save the time of doing dishes by cooking for both of us. But if we both bring carry-out home, we are less likely to share food, or do dishes for each other, which is similar to the second condition I mentioned in the above paragraph, two children already have marbles in front of them.

Another example would be going to camping. I went to camping last week, and I think it was a great example pf team production with gift exchange. There were 14 of us, 9 guys and 5 girls. Guys set up tents for all of us, which require more physical works, and our girls prepared food. The team production and gift exchange here made all of us better off – we did work that we were better at, and share the food and tent together as a team.

The two example I mentioned above are both engaged in fair gift exchange – people all did similar amount of work, and share gains from the work equally. But team production and gift exchange is not always this fair in reality. For example, in a group project, if one person did most of work for the entire group, it is unfair for the entire group to have the same grade. However, it is hard to measure every single member’s contribution to the team in many situations, and the spread of responsibility can make people in a team less motivated, so teamwork is not always more efficient than individual work.