Gift exchange

The article was quite interesting and it is surprising how children so young were able to somehow analyze when to share and when to be greedy. Though I did not expect such an analysis by children on the events, it could be reasoned that one would be more willing to split the gains when work is divided up evenly, to keep the gains when one comes up lucky and to keep all the gains when on did his own work even if both challenges were the same. Events that occur day to day can be compared to the experiment with similar outcomes. For example, lets say Tim and Jim are to friends walking down the road and Tim sees a twenty dollar bill on the floor and picks it up, what are the odds that Time will go out of his way to split the twenty in two tens to share with Jim? Slim to none. On the other hand lets say Tim and Jim want to make some cash and decide to mow their neighbor’s lawn for fifty dollars. They do an even amount of work and decide to split the fifty to twenty-five/ twenty-five. The reason I’m making these scenarios up because I believe that the “share the spoils” button is activated by a sense of fairness or perhaps a sense of security. What I mean by a sense of security is that someone will be more willing to help you out if you help them out, especially if both are facing the same troubles.

             When I was younger, roughly from ten till like seventeen, I would go to my home country every summer. My grandparents would house and feed me every summer but I would feel bad asking for spending money, so two of my cousins and msyself came up with an idea to make some money. An uncle of ours owns a Torta restaurant in our village, and we offered him to sell the tortas around town in an ice box (tortas are similar to sandwiches in that both contain a bread but the ingredients that go within the torta are similar to those in tacos). Our uncle was happy to help, and he even said we could keep the whole profits of out sales as long as we helped clean the restaurant after closing time.

            On our first day working for our uncle, my two cousins and myself met up at the restaurant to discuss what route we would take.  We figured that we would all start in what would be the downtown of our village, split up, and then meet back at the restaurant. Once we came up with our game plan we filled up our iceboxs with tortas and went on our way.

            I made quick progress with my sales in the downtown of our town since it was the most densely populated area and I decided to continue with my sales at other locations that would have a large population of people. I sold at parks, went to the waiting rooms of the clinics and to local businesses. By the end of the usual dinner time (5 o’clock), I had sold all of my tortas. I headed back to the restaurant to meet with my cousins but I only found one. We decided to wait for our other cousin but it took him about an extra hour to finally meet up with us and he still had some of the tortas claiming he was unable to sell them.

            What had happened was that one of my cousins and myself had a similar strategy of selling at densely populated areas, while my other cousin decided to take a more isolated route simply because he knew it better. At the end of the day, the cousin that took the densely populated route and myself had made more money than the other cousin. Though we took different routes, the both of us who had made more money believed that we had put in the same amount of work, especially since our other cousin walked around for and extra hour, so we concluded that it would be fair to divide up our profits evenly, giving my “poorer” cousin a gift.

            Though our conclusion seemed noble, I thought ahead and considered my income risk for the future. For all I knew, both my cousins could make more profit than me next time around, so it would behoove me to share some of my gains from today to achieve some security in the future.

            I think my experience with team production and gift exchange correlates with the piece. For example, the three of us thought we put in about the same amount of work, since cleaning up the restaurant was also part of the deal, so we thought it would be fair to divide up the profits evenly just like the children who had to work together to get marbles divided up their profits. To be honest, the outcome would have probably been different if we felt we had done more work than our “poorer” cousin. For example, if we had found out that he decided to take a break, explaining his extra hour or work, we would have decided to keep our own profits. The same can be said if we got lucky and a customer decided to tip us or if we had found some money on the floor, I highly doubt that would have been shared.