Not “at work” as in your place of employment, but “at work” as in, well, at work. I’d change the title if my poorly-caffeinated head allowed me any way to say that otherwise.
In a different thread,
As another example: lately at work there is the possibility that I, as a person who performs service, might be getting commission on selling service contracts. I’ve been going crazy trying to think of a proposal whereby this is possible without representing a conflict of interest (intentional sabotage or poor work in order to gain more business). Whether or not I know I am honest, unless the shceme was set up properly it would be nearly impossible to avoid suspicion.
Along those lines, I’ve met a lot of people who are skeptical about car mechanics.
What other jobs are there that seem to represent an obvious conflict of interest, allowing apparent scamming, oligarchy, and so on?
I work for a property management company. We deal with Horticulture and Landscaping for highend retail malls. Another fellow worker (BILL lets say) has some kind of deal that lets his brother (BOB lets say) (who runs a small lawnmowing company) do the majority of the big contracts. His brother doesn’t own the machines he uses, BILL does. BILL rents them out to his brother so he can in turn charge our company for doing the work. Last five years, his brother always seems to win the bids. This year my boss (and friend) wanted to go with a new guy. BOB is an ass. He’s lazy, never shows up on time, and does a generally shitty ass job. So this year my friend gets his bids in for the lawnmowing and neglects to tell BOB about it on purpose. My friend figures BOB knows when bids have to be in, he’s been doing it for the last five years after all. BOB never gets his bid in, I’ve been told he just assumed he had it so he didn’t waste time putting in a bid. So my friend submits 2 bids that were much cheaper than BOB to his boss. Which in the end was pointless because his boss said to go with BOB again. Not at all too weird, but BILL does alot of personal work for my friends boss. It’s well know that BILL is just a bitch for the guy higher up. Me thinks there’s some kickbacks flying around.
I don’t see the examples you give as conflict of interest, just principal/ agent problems. I guess I see conflicts as situations where someone is the agent for more than one principal (one of whom may be themself). But that’s probably an artificial distinction. Anyhoo:
doctors (with or even without insurers)
chefs
sales clerks
Any time you are engaging in an interaction that is not truly arms length (ie when any aspect of the transaction cannot be costlessly observed by you) this arises to some degree. Markets take care of it most of the time. Professional standards do the job to a degree at other times, although a cut is taken.
It seems, hawthorne, that I would generally accept your definition. I would look at it more like, “A conflict of interest occurs whenever it is in a person’s interest to act against their ‘job’ description.” Of course, I’m generally assuming that a person is almost always a dual agent, one for himself, and another as an employee. Generally, I suppose we could strain every situation to fit inside this definition, but otherwise I think we’re good to go.
I am not clear on why your lists represent a conflict of interest in a concrete sense. Well, doctors I can see, what with more test ordering (both the potential for individual and group behavior there) or poor performance virtually unchecked. Not sure about the chefs or sales clerks, though. Can you be more specific?
Yeah, but “job description” is going to be something determined by the relationship and the market.
Suppose we’ve got a diner in the boonies where the customer’s going to be a hundred miles away tomorrow and there are no “shitholes to avoid” guides available. The job of the chef is to make a meal the customer will pay for. Absent contraints, why not make a meal that will satisfy the customer but make him puke tomorrow, if following hygiene standards is costly?
More realistically, why wouldn’t a chef make a dish more delicious by adding rather more butter to a dish than I’d use at home? When you get a chef to cook a meal for you, they’re making choices for you that you can’t directly monitor. It’s reputation and competition that constrains them to undertake that task in the way that you want: unconstrained, they can do as they (or their employers) please.
As for retail clerks: “Does my arse look big in this?”, “Oh, not at all”. Or, more concretely: when I worked in retail in the run up to Christmas, our department had to meet certain sales targets. We sold those bug-zappers that don’t work. I knew they didn’t work. The department knew they didn’t work. Everyone knew that 90% of those sold would be returned for credit in the post-Christmas sales. The customers were getting fucked around and the store’s repuation ws being soiled. This was understood. But did we sell them? Sure, that was the incentive coming down from management. [This department of that store closed more than a decade ago.]
Hmm… I still don’t see the chef example, but the sales clerk is a very good one. As far as the chef goes, it is only in special circumstances costly for any particular cook or chef to follow food guidelines. I could see that as a short term conflict for the owners, however. If the owners happen to be the chefs, well, there you go.
Then the people are encouraged to choose a path and there isn’t a real conflict there. In the other examples, there is no “check” on the behavior because the person who could act unethically is their only monitor. The human digestive tract is the chef’s monitor–but there is a conflict of interest to lie about what goes in the food (“we use the finest fresh vegetables…” yet purchases frozen, low-cost junk for those dishes where a person won’t tell the difference) in some cases. It is in his interest as a chef to be a good one, and act appropriately, but it is in his interest as a businessperson to reduce costs, which directly conflicts in our chef-owner scenario. The problem here is: who is supposed to keep this in check? There is a collapse of “regulation” here (legal or otherwise). As with my personal example, I would be encouraged, or at least not discouraged, to behave unethically just by virtue of the situation (rather than as a comment on myself). There are no checks in place in the system I’ve described, so competing interests are free to compete.
Let’s return to the lawyer example: in only exceptional cases would any particular customer of a lawyer’s know how much time and effort would be required for the person’s case; generally, we trust the lawyer to be honest at this. The lawyer has a clear conflict of interests, and yet there is no regulation of interests because he is acting as his own supervisor. Any safeguarding mechanism is short-circuited.
I guess I’m saying that the situation is everywhere, but is a problem where markets don’t deal with it. The more unusual the client’s problem is, either in its niche or its repetition, the more likely that control of the agent’s problem is going to be.
Mrs hawthorne is a barrister. She has few repeat clients. Her quality is constrained by the perception of the firms (experienced in the field) that brief her. Their reputation is maintained by those repeat customers who keep specialised lawyers in the area employed.
Here here! Don’t you hate when you go to see a poll, and a semantic argument breaks out?
Consulting is rife with this kind of stuff (whatever you want to call it).
When bidding for a project, you’ll want to price it as low as feasible, to beat out the competition. As a salaried employee, I am not compensated for any overtime I work. The project manager (and other “titled” employees) are generally given bonuses based on how much profit the project makes. There are no immediate financial penalties for delivering a poor quality product, or pissing off the customer, or for not winning up follow-up work. The end result is often employees at the very bottom working their asses off to meet some arbitrary deadline (“we will deliver X functionality to you by this date, for this amount of money, with penalties for late delivery”). In the long run, of course, this causes experienced, knowledgeble workers to leave and a poor reputation for the company, resulting in less projects, more training for new hires and overall less revenue in the future. :smack:
The actual contracts are weird too. One thing I’ve seen is to practically give a product away. The product is normally large, poorly documented, and very difficult to maintain. But of course we will be happy to sign a maintenance contract - often X consultants at an hourly rate for as long as needed. Not suprisingly, customization and maintenance is where we get most of our revenue. Like Chris Rock says, that’s how they get you - on the come back. The first hit is always free!
Which leads to a generalization - any business where there is a posibility of getting the customer to return repeatedly, instead of filling their need once, is automatically suspect in my mind.
Teachers have a sort of conflict of interest, but our own intrests are not so much the issue. Teachers have to balence the interests of the school system/principal (which hired them), the school board (the elected body that oversees the school system but which, by the nature of being elected, has very different priorities), the state (which has its own laws) and, finally, the parents, whose kids are being educated at the school. Theoretically, the kids are involved in there too, but they are way down the list.
All these orginizations/institutions/individuals have very different interests in education and teaching is often a matter of juggling these conflicting interests.
Using that definition, it would seem as though my field (mental health therapy) would be a prime example of this. My job is to help the client not need me anymore, but perhaps my wallet doesn’t want to accept this. While I have heard plenty of stories about therapists who keep patients dependent on them, and actually make the patient worse, I can honestly say that it is no picnic to work with a client who is not getting better. I can’t even see how it would be worth it, but perhaps if I were a really highly paid practitioner in private practice, I might feel otherwise.
You can get quite a few conflicts of interests in remote towns and such. Jimbo, for example, owns the only garage in Quaintville. He also owns the only hotel. Someone passing through town has a minor problem with their car. Jimbo knows that he could have it fixed before evening, and the person could be on their way. Of course, if he says that he can’t have it fixed before morning, then he’s got a customer for his hotel. Poor Jimbo. What should he do?
