Incentives and behavior

I read an interesting blog post (well, interesting to someone who spent much of his life teaching and doing research about labor economics). and you. too, can read it here: http://conversableeconomist.blogspot.com/2020/04/are-atternative-work-arrangements.html)

What it did, in part, was to make me think about my third summer job, in the summer of 1966.  I think I got the job because my brother Dave had worked there in 1965 (and was working there in 1966, as well), and he had done a good enough job that they hired me.

We were retail route salesmen...for Banquet Dairy...we were milkmen.  And we did not get paid an hourly wage or a weekly salary, we got paid on the basis of how much we *collected* from out customers.  As I recall, the commission for most of what we sold was 17% (of course, we also had to collect it).  Now, if you're doing this permanently, you obviously have to be concerned both with how much you collected *and* how much you sold.

My routes (Monday-Thursday; Tuesday-Friday; Wednesday-Saturday) had larger than normal unpaid balances; in fact, those routes were open because the guy whose routes they had been sold a lot, but didn't collect very much.  So I figured out fairly quickly that my job #1 was to get people to pay up.  And, yes, I also sold a fair amount of product.  But I spent a lot of time knocking on doors, even of people who were not currently buying anything--and might not have been the people who ran up the unpaid balances, and talking them into paying at least something. [1]

I might add that none of my routes were in a really good part of Indy; they were all in the "near north" neighborhoods.  Basically, for those of you who know Indy, north of Tenth Street, south of 30th Street; Park Ave. east to College.  It's a somewhat better neighborhood now, and probably half of the places I delivered to have been torn down and some replaced--a lot of vacant land these days.  Gentrification there is proceeding *very* slowly.

So I collected and collected and collected, and by the end of the summer, the unpaid balances were somewhat less than half what they'd been at the beginning of summer.  I collected a lot more than I sold.  Earned more that summer than I did in any of my other summer jobs, but I did not try to go back for the summer of 1967...

I had, by that time, learned something about how incentives can shape behavior...and that, sometimes, the usual incentives (in this case, for whoever followed me, and who looked on this job as more-or-less permanent) do not work particularly.  (I felt sorry for whoever got those routes in September 1966; they had a fairly small unpaid balance, which meant they had to sell more than a normal amount, at least for a while--there was no cushion.)

[1] I wondered then, and for some time after, why someone who had not bought that unpaid-for milk would pay me anyway.  I suspect that some of them had moved there with unpaid balances elsewhere, and some of them were just intimidated...not that I thought of myself as intimidating...