Discussion About Opportunism

The first idea come to my mind when I am thinking about opportunism is the tragedy of the commons. The tragedy is about how people’s act when limited common goods are provided; without proper regulations, people are tended to consume common goods as much as they can and waste up most of the resource. The common trait of being an opportunist and wasting common goods is that both are totally legal. You may not even feel bad if you are a person doesn’t care about moral ethics a lot.

Even if that being an opportunism is not illegal, it does harm our communities or societies. Just like the tragedy that people spoil all common goods provided by the government. There was an example just happened few days ago in my class of game theory. Professor wanted to play an anonymous game with students, game rules are clearly given: all students can choose either 5 free points or 20 free points added to their next assignments; however, nobody gets free points if four or more students select 20 points. Let me specify the situation using some concepts I mentioned above: common goods, free points, are given by the professor; opportunists will choose 20 pints and other students will choose 5 points. For opportunists, they didn’t really care about others, the best result they could get is 20 points; or either no one got free points. Other students cared about the community instead, they all chose 5 points to make sure all students in the class could get 5 free points. Guess what happened? There were over ten students out of thirty students chose 20 points and no one got free points. This is a case that opportunists harm a community’s welfare.

I was one of students who didn’t act as an opportunism. Why would I do that when I had chance to get 20 free points. It was because that I assumed that all well- trained economics students in my class cared about community’s welfare and wouldn’t do selfish decisions. Well, I was terribly wrong. I believe that two third students are as shocked as me, we were all mad at those selfish students. This case is just a small sample with only thirty people, what would happen if this game was played with whole population around the world? I believe that the result will be the same. Only few selfish people can ruin whole society’s welfare.  

I would like to take another example to talk about what I think about being selfish. I have a Korean neighbor who likes to play guitar and sing romantic songs. He sings quite well and his voice is lovely. Considering that he is unselfish to share his songs with me, I should be appreciated. The truth is that I don’t. Who the hell will hold personal concert in the midnight when I am trying to get some sleep? This Korean neighbor is so punctual and always start singing at 12:00 am, which really drives me crazy. Is he selfish? Not really, because he is willing to share his voice. However, it is not right when you hurt someone’s right to sleep. I cannot say that I am an unselfish and altruistic people. I do like to gain myself as much utility as I can get, BUT only under the circumstance that I won’t harm other’s welfare. In short, it is OK to be selfish when alone, because you cannot hurt others’ welfare. Yet it is unforgivable if people act selfish when they are in a community.

 Be honest, I abominate selfish people, such as opportunists. I cannot tolerate people who make noise in a quiet studying room and wish that I could punch them in the face without breaking the law. That is one of the reasons why I did research about sharing economy few years ago. Sharing economy is about sharing some spare things out, people can charge fees for things that they share. The price of using shared things is usually cheaper than buying a new one. Sounds like a quite unselfish economy. Take Airbnb for example, people who have spare houses can rent them out and make some extra money, prices charged by hosts are normally cheaper than prices of hotels. The intention was good: share things, make friends and gain some money. It is hard to relate sharing economy with opportunism in the beginning. Then again, opportunists showed up and ruined everything. How so? Here is another personal experience.

I used to do Airbnb when I traveled to Japan. The room was extremely clean and the host was super friendly, which was totally worthwhile to pay that amount of money. The host treated me as a friend and it seemed like that she doesn’t only want to make money but is willing to make friends. Then everything changed when I tried Airbnb in Boston. The ratings of the Airbnb I stayed in Japan and Boston were equally high, but the experiences were not the same. I couldn’t able to meet the host for a week and the room wasn’t so clean, which makes me felt that the host only wanted to use the Airbnb system to make money. I gradually realized that tons of Airbnb hosts are opportunists. They know that is easy to apply as a host and they don’t really care about what customers feel. Who dares to rate them low, they can rate the customer low in return, which makes the customer hard to find next Airbnb housing. Unfortunately, those behaviors, even like threats, are undetectable and legal. It turned out that I don’t use Airbnb anymore. Because I believe that there is possibility I may find an opportunistic host again.


I talked about the tragedy of the commons, opportunism, and selfishness. Those concepts are all connected. Those people who act selfish in societies are opportunists, and they may result in the tragedy of the commons. Those people who have chance to act opportunistically but choose not to is because they care more about the entirety of social welfare. Not being opportunist may not be the best choice for organizations which want to maximize profits. Still, the prevalence of corporate social responsibility (CSR) makes me believe that some organizations do care about social welfare. Though we cannot ask opportunists to be unselfish, we can choose not to act like them. Not because we feel superior to do so, it’s only because that we believe we are doing something right.

Comments

  1. Professor ArvanSeptember 21, 2017 at 3:16 PM

    I encourage you in the future to stick with one example and push it further, rather than give a variety of different ones. That said, I had a chuckle about your neighbor signing Korean romantic songs at midnight. I fully understand your preference, but this is a college town full of students who like to play music --- very loudly. Perhaps you should be thankful that your neighbor doesn't play hip hop at high volume.

    Let me take on one general these in your essay - some people are selfish, others are not. To the extent that is true, and given the preferences that you have articulated, you'd want to associate only with those who are not. If that is not possible as a practical alternative, then you'd try to minimize your reliance on people who are selfish.

    A different hypothesis is that people are selfish or not, depending on circumstances. One variable that matters for this is how much they understand the consequences of their own actions. What you are terming selfishness in your post might instead be ignorance of consequences. If people understood the consequences, would they act differently as a result?

    To illustrate, suppose your Game Theory teacher ran the experiment a second time. Would you predict the same results as the first time through? Or might some of the people who chose 20 points the first time choose 5 points the second time? Let's say that happened and you were able to interview them about why they changed their choice. You might then develop some insight that to prevent selfishness in others, raising their awareness is key, but also seeing is believing. Explaining the theory may not be enough.

    In other words, we learn by our mistakes, oftentimes much more than we learn from our success. If you give people a chance to recover from their mistakes, maybe they won't be so selfish after that.

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  2. Christina RomerSeptember 25, 2017 at 10:09 PM

    Thanks for sharing your experience in your game theory class. I think this highlights a bigger message that often those who do not act opportunistically believe in the good of others or humanity itself. They might have thought that they could get by with their actions since others would act in the betterment of the group. Their actions may have been justified in their eyes, but as seen by the outcome of the experiment, seem to have been less than justified. With the split in your class, it is interesting to see how Economics students in particular have reacted to this experiment. I could see how you would be upset with the outcome of the experiment and hope that you have another way of getting extra credit for the class!

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