Recessed toileting

I guess this post in the NYT is something I could hardly let go.

This year, it seems, the sagging economy may now be having an unexpected effect on methods and timing of training. Disposable diapers are not cheap (an average of 42 cents each); neither are training pants (68 cents a piece), which, while convenient, do not rise to the level of necessary. Sales of the latter are falling ...

The theory is simple. Pull-ups are, at least at the margin, a substitute for putting more effort into toilet training but come at two costs -- it may take longer and it definitely costs more money. When money is tight, you cut back on pull-ups and faced with mess but in more effort so training occurs at a faster rate. (Technically, theory is that toilet training is rare example of an inferior or Giffen good). The post provides an anecdote to back this up.

But I would be remiss if I didn't point out that it could move in another way. It is unclear whether the fall in sales (usually revenue) is quantity -- number of pants/nappies -- or price -- people switching to cheaper brands. Our now 5 year old is not yet trained at night. It might be that she isn't ready but I'll tell you that there ain't much parental effort going into it this time around. (Regular readers will understand why we might have just given up after Child No.2).

Anyhow, if she was just going to wee in them, we moved away from Pull-Ups to a much cheaper no-name brand which does the job. So our expenditures on this are way down this year. The problem is that with cheaper 'units' we have even less incentive to make a push to get her out of her training pants. So if this is the case, then the recession may not lead to accelerated toileting. Toilet training could be a normal good that happens quicker when income rises.

So there you go. I've matched the NYT anecdote with a countervailing one and resolved nothing. I wonder what brave economist is going to collect the data to resolve the issue of whether toileting training is a normal or Giffen good?

Who to compensate in toilet training?

Matt Asay is trying to deal with toilet training one child when there is an older one around. They decided to bribe both. The problem is that you are incentivising a team:

How you compensate a sales team can create all sorts of good incentives and/or perverse disincentives. For example, do you really want your channel sales team/person competing hard against your direct sales team...when you have fewer than five people on the team? Do you really want inside sales to hold down the value of a deal if, for example, they are required to turn over any deal worth more than $100,000? If they get paid $0 for a deal worth $350,000 and 5 percent on a deal worth $99,999, that deal is going to be held to $99,999 regardless of what would be best for the company.

And so on. My CEO calls double compensation "double bubble," and we generally try to avoid it as much as possible. But as with Greta and Lily, sometimes it makes a lot of sense to compensate two people on the same deal, especially early in a company's life when cooperation between the sales team should trump competition between the team. You will end up with times when a salesperson will get compensated when they added zero value to the close of a deal, but in the long run you're rewarding the effects of a team effort (exceeding a sales goal/potty training).

Near as I can tell, he had it easy. His eldest just demanded payment. Regular readers of this blog will recall that I tried the same thing but with worse consequences:

... we decided to implement our more explicit incentive system that had worked well with Child No.1. But there was a twist: Child No.1 was around and in many ways we need her help. So Child No.2 would receive a sweet reward -- one or two jelly babies as the case may be. But also where he was successful, Child No.1 would receive the same. We viewed all this as a team effort and Child No.1 was part of the team. To align her incentives we gave her a share of the pie.

That part worked swimmingly. She encouraged our son to sit on the potty and spent time showing her books. It seemed that we may have efficiently outsourced this activity: something valuable in our time strapped lives.

Alas, it was not quite to be. We had to put a stop to it all when we discovered Child No.1 feeding Child No.2 copious amounts of water to help the process along! (By the way, in case you are wondering Child No.1 was 4 years old at the time).

The basic rule of incentives: if you want to pay per success, make sure that the agent can't determine the number of opportunities for success.

Toilet Training and Incentives: Child No.3

This week marks the end of an era for us. For the past eight and a half years we have been virtually non-stop in nappies. Now I am happy to report that Child No.3, who is just about to turn 3, is out of nappies (at least during the day). And what is more, it was all done with the efficient management style that befitting parents who have been through this twice before.

Regular readers may recall that we have dealt with the strategic behaviour of Child No.1 and the dis-interest and the well-meaning gaming of Child No.2. Those were quite a work-out. So when it came to Child No.3 we adopted a strategy, ruthless efficient in its application and very light in terms of taxing our own energy: we outsourced the whole deal.

Now, by outsourcing, I don't mean that we just sent our daughter away to some service and then they delivered her back ready to go. Those, apparently, exist for dogs and I won't pretend that we wouldn't have availed ourselves of a human service had it existed. But it does not. Instead, we relied on her carers at child care to handle the entire exercise. They initiated toilet training, encouraged our daughter and eventually succeeded well before we did much at all at home. All we were left to do was to set her straight at home which, suffice to say, is not too hard once she had revealed her abilities to the wider community.

Child care is the perfect place for all this. First of all, the carers there have as much, if not more, incentives as we do to get children trained. They change more nappies and also have to potentially deal with them for years to come. They have no desired for a 'slow to train' child. Of course, our son had to leave their capable hands before he was done and was to move to a pre-school that required a trained kid. Suffice it to say, that dampened incentives somewhat. But give child care a time horizon with another 1000 nappy changes and we have a tight alignment of interests.

Second, and this goes without saying, they have seen it all. They are simply more capable in terms of knowing the signs, assessing readiness and doing all of the other crap (literally) that first time parents think but cannot do.

Finally, the children have peers. Now the power of peer pressure is something that can lead to good and evil. The evil usually becomes apparently as your child follows others to leap off a several metre high structure or starts sucking noodles up their noses. But the good can be equally as powerful. With all the other kids successfully going to the toilet, there is intense pressure to join in and do so in a meaningful way. Your child wants to get the same cheers their friends are getting for demonstrated activity. And they don't want to have themselves tended for to clean a soiled nappy up.

Even wearing a nappy can be socially difficult. A friend's three year old son, who wasn't in lots of child care, shed himself of a nappy when he was made fun of by a random older kid in a playground. Of course, in that instance, that meant no night-time nappy and a few difficulties for his parents as a consequence of that.

For our daughter, she shed herself of a nappy at child care. Indeed, in the early part of it, she would convince some of the more part-time carers that she didn't wear a nappy; although apparently those earlier forays met with unfortunate results. But it continued later on too. I remember being informed, having collected her and driven her half the way home that, "I don't have a nappy on." Being on the freeway there was not much I could do. So I went with it and all was well.

I won't pretend that we were totally free of obligation. For a while, there was a distinct difference between her behaviours at home and elsewhere. But once we got on the program, deployed a few incentives, we were done in a matter of days.

So the moral of our story is pretty simple. When you have (virtually) once-off activities for which you have no competence to manage, you should outsource it to those who deal with it regularly and also have plenty of experience. The end result is pretty much the same but with less stress, lower pressure and cleaner carpets.

Harford on Toilet Training Incentives

As regular readers of this blog know, there is some subtlety to the application of economic incentives for toilet training. Our experiences are documented here, here and here. And we are currently in the midst of doing this again for Child No.3.

Tim Harford, who has written the successful book The Undercover Economist, has just discovered these issues and writes in the FT:

Let me start with the elder Miss Harford, who this week demonstrated that she is well capable of controlling her bodily functions. She peed on the floor five times in quick succession in an attempt to divert her mother from feeding the younger Miss Harford.

Fine. She knows how to use the potty, so all that is now required is the right incentive. Chocolate coins turn out to be the sort of currency a two-year-old understands. Successful use of the potty earns such a coin. It works, and is money well spent.

Yet two days into the contract, problems are emerging. What is “successful use of the potty”? She doesn’t always make it there in time. But at this early stage, we choose to accentuate (and reward) the positive. In a month’s time I will be less impressed, but can we really move the goalposts then?

Even straightforward incentives can be manipulated. The great pole vaulter, Sergei Bubka, repeatedly broke the world record by a centimetre - and earned a cash bonus every time. I have visions of the near future in which Miss Harford empties her bladder one drop at a time in order to scoop bagfuls of chocolate coins.

As we are discovering, apparently black-and-white matters of performance can quickly become shades of grey. It is much more tempting to resort to discretion: if we’re happy with Miss Harford’s performance, chocolate coins will be forthcoming.

This sounds a bit like your boss’s vague promise to review your pay some time the year after next. Employees know that bosses are lying weasels and wisely ignore such empty words. Daughters know that parents are lying weasels too, which is why we must keep our incentive payments as unambiguous as possible.

Suffice it to say, Tim Harford's worries are likely to become reality and so the game for him is truely afoot.