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Contact Ben Horowitz for $20

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Re: Contact Ben Horowitz for $20

#61
post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

He has a giant pile of money to dole out to startups.

Methinks it's the other way around, but whatever.

Wait, are you saying that startups have huge piles of money to give to Ben Horowitz? It's arguable that the bulk of his wealth has come from the returns from startup investing, but by the time they generate any kind of return for him, they're no longer startups.

Re: Contact Ben Horowitz for $20

#63
post #8

It may could encourage people to contact him more by giving them a form of permission: > To come to our surprising conclusion, Uri ran an experiment: Out of 10 daycare centers across Haifa, they randomly chose six and introduced a small fine for parents who showed up more than 10 minutes late in each of them. In day cares where the fine was introduced, parents immediately started showing up late, with tardiness level…

I'd really like to see this study re-done with multiple fine sizes. My intuition is that monetary repercussion is valued smaller than the social repercussion.

There might even be a optimal fine level to make profit off the tardy parents.

Re: Contact Ben Horowitz for $20

#64

This is such an incredible way to raise money for a great cause. If you have people trying to access you, why not put something like this together? I love that this is benefiting someone other than Ben. Kudos to him for doing this. Hopefully more follow his example.

are you serious? if Horowitz was really committed to the cause he would just personally donate a large amount of money (he has plenty) and not bother engaging in any of the public virtue signaling behaviors. it seems pretty obvious that he put the "donated to charity" sticker on the form to deflect accusations that he was profiteering from his fame. seems to me more like he was getting too much shit mail and wanted t…

Related to this, the meta description claims you'll only pay if you get a response.

Re: Contact Ben Horowitz for $20

#65
post #8

It may could encourage people to contact him more by giving them a form of permission: > To come to our surprising conclusion, Uri ran an experiment: Out of 10 daycare centers across Haifa, they randomly chose six and introduced a small fine for parents who showed up more than 10 minutes late in each of them. In day cares where the fine was introduced, parents immediately started showing up late, with tardiness level…

I'm curious what the fine level was relative to the income of the parents, and if the fine was viewed more as a convenience fee than a penalty.

I'm thinking if the fine was raised to a high enough dollar amount, tardiness would again drop off, or at the very least, revenue would increase enough to justify hiring someone to stay late...

Re: Contact Ben Horowitz for $20

#66
post #8

It may could encourage people to contact him more by giving them a form of permission: > To come to our surprising conclusion, Uri ran an experiment: Out of 10 daycare centers across Haifa, they randomly chose six and introduced a small fine for parents who showed up more than 10 minutes late in each of them. In day cares where the fine was introduced, parents immediately started showing up late, with tardiness level…

I'm curious what the fine level was relative to the income of the parents, and if the fine was viewed more as a convenience fee than a penalty. I'm thinking if the fine was raised to a high enough dollar amount, tardiness would again drop off, or at the very least, revenue would increase enough to justify hiring someone to stay late...

I don't think income plays into it. It converts the transaction of one of spending social capital (social mores, trust) to financial capital; social capital, IMHO, is harder to acquire, therefore far more valuable.

Anyways, because you asked:

http://rady.ucsd.edu/faculty/directory/gneezy/pub/docs/fine....

"It is true that a ‘‘large enough’’ fee would eventually reduce the behavior. For instance, many day-care centers in the United States clearly announce a fee for coming late at the start of the year, and this fee is large and proportional to the length of the delay. The resulting penalty is more severe for the average delay than the nonlinear fine we introduced in our study, even after adjusting for difference in prices and incomes in the two countries. Casual observation shows that there are few delays, but we have not examined if the average delay is different from the one in our sample. Comparing the two systems would be an interesting research project."

Re: Contact Ben Horowitz for $20

#67
post #8

It may could encourage people to contact him more by giving them a form of permission: > To come to our surprising conclusion, Uri ran an experiment: Out of 10 daycare centers across Haifa, they randomly chose six and introduced a small fine for parents who showed up more than 10 minutes late in each of them. In day cares where the fine was introduced, parents immediately started showing up late, with tardiness level…

In the experiment you mentioned, the fine is small enough, that it doesn't produce any significant revenues. The goal is to minimize the number of people who show up late.

Imagine if the day-care made the "fine" high enough that they actually want people to show up late. Ie, think credit-card interest rates and late-payment fees. In that case, regardless of whether tardiness goes up-or-down, the daycare would win either way.

Let's compare this to Ben Horowitz' situation. Imagine if it takes him 5 minutes to read and send a cookie-cutter response. That works out to a hourly rate of $240/hour. Even for a VC, that's a pretty damn good hourly rate. If Ben stops getting spammed by people, I think he'd be perfectly happy with that. If he were to get flooded by spammers willing to pay him $500k/year to send cookie-cutter responses, I think he'd be ok with that as well. It's a win-win for him.

Re: Contact Ben Horowitz for $20

#68
post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Incentives for behavior modification is always a fascinating area. In this case, the daycare was incentivized to track people being late more closely since they had a financial interest in doing so. I suspect the outcome was somewhere in the middle of more accurate record keeping and introducing the ability for the parents to pay off their guilt.

It also made the behavior socially acceptable. "So many people are late that we introduced a fine" "Oh phew, it's not just me. Everyone's doing it"

But also, you'd feel guilty for making people wait for you, but with this you'd just think "Oh I won't make it in time, but no worries, it's just 5 more dollars [or whatever the rate is]."

Re: Contact Ben Horowitz for $20

#70
post #8

It may could encourage people to contact him more by giving them a form of permission: > To come to our surprising conclusion, Uri ran an experiment: Out of 10 daycare centers across Haifa, they randomly chose six and introduced a small fine for parents who showed up more than 10 minutes late in each of them. In day cares where the fine was introduced, parents immediately started showing up late, with tardiness level…

We've seen this come up a lot recently with Tesla's move to fine drivers who "park" at charging stations. Many see this as actually worsening the problem as people are happier to pay the (relatively small) fine.

I'd read both this article as well as the one about Tesla, but it never would have occurred to me to connect the two! So many aspects of behavioral economics seem counterintuitive at first (introducing penalties increases rule-breaking) but are obvious in hindsight (monetary penalties appear to reframe a calculation away from social decision-making toward economic decision-making, which can change the participants' conclusions toward the penalty)!
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