The London Times printed an excerpt from Freakonomics that is pretty interesting. A former economist for the US Government went into business providing bagels to companies each morning and leaving a box for the companies’ employees to put money in if they ate a bagel. He also provided a suggested price for them to pay. After that he relied on the honor system for his payment.
Being an economist the guy kept detailed data about his sales. He was able to track the payment rate (or cheating rate if you want to be negative) on a company-by-company basis. At one company he was even able to track the cheating rate of the executive suite vs. the lower level employees. Here’s a quote:
He also believes that employees further up the
corporate ladder cheat more than those below. He got this idea after
delivering for years to one company spread out over three floors — an
executive floor on top and two lower floors with sales, service, and
administrative employees. (Feldman wondered if perhaps the executives
cheated out of an overdeveloped sense of entitlement. What he didn’t
consider is that perhaps cheating was how they came to be executives.)
The excerpt also has some interesting comparisons of small companies vs. large companies, the effect of weather and other factors. Definitely a fun read.
FYI, I’m in the middle of reading Freakonomics (which is excellent) and I’ll probably be posting observations about it here in the future.
Befuddled 