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Accountability sinks

(aworkinglibrary.com)
493 points l0b0 | 1 comments | | HN request time: 0.329s | source
1. w10-1 ◴[] No.41898505[source]
This is a small part of business reality. It's not clear how calling out a specific aspect really helps; indeed, it may hurt when business leaders learn how to do this more effectively. It's not at all clear that calling people irresponsible or unaccountable is actually effective at changing the transaction features; it likely makes things worse.

Transaction cost economics since the 1960's has been enumerating aspects like these, and showing they in fact determine the shape of business organizations and markets. Exported costs (implied in accountability sink) are mostly the rule rather than the exception.

What to do with them? A primary TCE finding is that if there were no transaction costs to adjudicating liability, it wouldn't matter from the social cost perspective where the liability lay (with the perpetrator or the victim) because they would adjudicate it down to their mitigation costs. As a result, the main policy goal for assigning liability (if you want to minimize the total cost to society) is actually to minimize and correct for adjudication transaction costs. (hence, no-fault divorce and car insurance)

The same dynamics are at play in the market and within organizations.

As a participant if your goal is your own profit, you can gain by making it harder to adjudicate and reducing the benefits thereof (hence binding arbitration, waivers, and lack of effective feedback). Doing so is becoming much simpler as virtual transaction interfaces and remote (even foreign) support afforded by software replace face-to-face interactions bound by social convention.

And who wouldn't want to? If you're head of customer support or developer relations, would you document your bugs or face the wrath of customers for things which can't change fast enough? You'd want to protect yourself and your staff from all the negativity. Indeed, with fixed salaries, your only way of improving your lot is to make your job easier.

To me the solution is to identify when incorporating the feedback actually benefits the participants. There, too, the scalability of virtualized software interfaces can help, e.g., the phone tree that automates simple stuff most people need and vectors complex questions to real people who aren't so harried, or the departing-customer survey querying whether it was price, quality, or service that drove one away.

You have to make accountability profitable.