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Unread 03-06-2011, 04:40
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Re: Please help Wave Robotics earn $1,000!!!

Quote:
Originally Posted by eagle33199 View Post
Now, lets assumed you're a salaried worker, and make the same amount regardless of working 40 hours or 41 hours or even 80 hours a week. Suddenly your whole argument collapses because that extra hour of leisure time spent wouldn't have made you anything if you spent it at work. In fact, you could argue that it detracts from your hourly wages, as you're putting in more time for the same amount.

Now, lets assume an employer's view of hourly workers. Likely they'll want to cap people at 40 hours/week, otherwise they have to pay them overtime (it's law in most, if not all, states). I know - back in the day (high school/college) when I was hourly, I wasn't allowed to work more than 40... and my boss would literally be standing there at the end of the week if I was pushing the limit to ensure I clocked out on time. Now, the difference between working 40 hours and 41 hours is.... not computable, as you aren't allowed to work 41 hours!

Now, what about students sitting in class? doing a mindless task like this during class for many people is perfectly acceptable, as they can still pay attention to the material being presented. This is a period of the day they physically can't be working, as they are obligated to be in class.

So in many cases, working that extra hour and donating those wages really isn't possible. How does that figure into your calculations?
You'll note the footnote a couple posts up where I referred to those assumptions. I'm not ignoring them—but describing them does make things quite a bit more complex. To help make the point, let me introduce the economic concept of utility: basically, think of it as a currency that indicates how useful something is (to you, to someone else, or to the world). The trouble is, the exchange rate with dollars fluctuates with the circumstances—sometimes you need an Allen wrench, so the utility of a Phillips screwdriver is nearly zero at that instant. (But obviously that screwdriver could be useful under different conditions.) Figuring out the exact exchange rate is complicated—in fact, it's basically impossible. But that doesn't mean we can't make good estimates based on the conditions at hand. (It's perfectly reasonable to call the accuracy of a particular estimate into question, but that's an argument over details rather than the validity of the model.) Previously, we'd been assuming that since you were donating an hour of leisure, its exact value wasn't important. Here, we'll have to compare that value with an amount of money, and calculate losses, so it needs to be converted using the utility exchange rate.

In the next two cases (C & D), assume that there's no value to working more than normal...so you don't. You can think of the hourly case as a simplified version of the salaried case. They're basically the same, except that for the salaried case, your wage is also a variable (which depends on the work you had to accomplish during that particular week, and your productivity). That just makes everything very complex, but you'll see that the same trends hold.
  1. You work 40 h in total. Every day, you spend a few minutes with the pig, totalling 1 h.
  2. You work 41 h in total. You donate 1 h worth of wages ($7.25) to the team.
  3. You work exactly 40 h as an hourly worker. You donate $7.25 to the team.
    If your employer allows you to work exactly 40 hours per week, no more and no less, and won't listen when you explain that it's for a good cause, then option B isn't available to you. So instead, you might substitute option C where you donate $7.25 from your own pocket (so now, the employer gets exactly 40 h of labour, but you keep 39 h worth of wages). Now you're worse off than before; let's say you'd be happy to give up utility equivalent to what you would have donated in B, but that the additional loss of utility makes you unhappy. That means that there is a loss to you, and therefore an incremental loss to society. Depending on the utility exchange rate (i.e. how strongly you value that loss—is that money you can't save for retirement, or does it mean your family will not eat tomorrow?), it shifts the tipping point higher. But unless that hour's wage is of extreme importance to you (or to society), the results are similar: the cash donation is still a better option than clicking the pig for an hour.

    The benefit to society is $donated + $productivity/h × 40 h − $loss. So numerically, given equal productivity in cases A and C, the donation is good value when $donated − $loss > $1 000.00. Expressed another way, that means that the tipping point is based on whether or not you accumulate enough donor-hours to overcome $1 000 + $loss. Unless the loss is huge (i.e. unless you really need that money, and thus probably shouldn't be donating it in the first place), it doesn't shift the tipping point by much.

    So basically, unless you really need that money you're donating, case C is very similar to case B (and hence it doesn't really matter that you can't work 41 h).
  4. You work as much as necessary as a salaried worker. You donate $7.25 to the team.
    Your rate of pay diminishes with the number of hours you work (you're expected to get the job done, using whatever reasonable number of hours it takes). You can think of this in two ways: one is basically the same as C above, one is ridiculously difficult to deal with at a practical level.

    In the first sub-case (D1), let's just pick a number for your average rate of pay—you might be making roughly $29.00/h instead of $7.25/h, because on balance, the salaried workers around here tend to be compensated at several times the minimum wage. This is likely to imply that what you lose by giving money to the team (e.g. $7.25, or 15 min worth of wages) will not result in a major loss of utility to you. So again, the benefit to society is $donated + $productivity/h × 40 h − $loss, where loss is probably relatively small.

    In the second sub-case (D2), which I would consider to be impractical to compute under virtually all circumstances, you now treat productivity and wage as variables, and actually identify what you're earning and how efficiently you're working at the exact moment in question. Assuming you want to be a good employee, you always have a choice between being thorough, or being slightly less thorough and taking more time as leisure. Your concept of that work-life balance is going to depend on a number of factors, including how badly you want to demonstrate that you're worthy of future advancement (thoroughness is likely correlated with being selected for promotion, and with higher future salary), and how much you value various other things in your life (including doing work in support of charity). Similarly, unless you work for the Mafia or something, thoroughness in your job is likely correlated with societal benefit—though the exact rate is very difficult to nail down, because your own productivity fluctuates. (It's probably safe to say that for all reasonable cases, you're a net benefit to your employer, and furthermore a net benefit to society.) In case B, we ignored the extra productivity you give to your employer, because it was small and difficult to quantify. Here, we need to think about it, and it comes down to this question: with respect to the productivity variable, would society be better off with you being a bit more thorough at work (and therefore improving your future prospects, and therefore having more lifetime income to donate to good causes), or instead with you just doing a sufficient job (and reducing your lifetime income, but having more leisure time to spend filling a pig). If you donate directly, the benefit to society is still $donated + $productivity/h × 40 h − $loss. That's obviously not easy to answer when everything's in flux, but I think that instead following the D1 method and taking a best guess at what your hourly wage is this week will yield a very good estimate, without the computational nastiness.
  5. You're a student in class. You feed the pig when you're not otherwise busy, eventually depositing as many coins over the week as a person could do in an hour.
    It's possible that the class you're taking is slow enough that you can operate the piggybank during class without diminishing your comprehension of the lesson. Furthermore, hopefully the teacher is easygoing enough that they won't be offended by you feeding the pig. And maybe you can even do so without distracting other students. And let's say you're in the United States, where gambling online for money is frowned upon (much more so in class)—so basically you are not able to convert that class time into cash that could be donated instead. If there really is no practical alternative, then sure, I guess you should play the Flash game. But do you actually envision this being the case? (And if so, isn't that some sort of damning indictment of the school?)

I think that a lot of the problem I have with this system is that the payout is not proportional to the effort. The harder you try, the less you get for each quantum of effort. While slogging through diminishing returns is probably necessary to win the FRC championship, that's something for which there's no practical alternative—who would pay you so that you don't need to compete? Equally, if it were a case of "this or nothing", it would make sense to persevere despite diminishing returns. But given that there are alternatives, why not explore those instead?

And as for the "cheating" angle, if the payoff was proportional to the effort, then yes, scripting coin deposits would cause an actual financial loss to the donor, beyond what they may have reasonably expected from humans alone. I think that's the point where the question of right and wrong really becomes meaningful. But as it stands, there's no loss to society, other than the time you expend trying to win the game.

Quote:
Originally Posted by GaryVoshol View Post
Now in the productivity and cost equations, suppose the piggy-bank-stuffer was doing it while at work ...
Productivity decreases, so they'd have to work harder to reach the tipping point...in other words, when dealing with the benefit to society, there's no free lunch. (But note that there is a potential free lunch when only considering the benefit to the team.)

Quote:
Originally Posted by Tyler Olds View Post
Can a moderator please close this thread and open up a new one pertaining to fundraising and methods involved?? I would appreciate this discussion being held with no specific teams involved.
How about we just stop referring to Wave by name in the examples?
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