Issue 19, Fall 2000

William A. McEachern, Editor

The Tribe Has Spoken

By the time you read this, the CBS hit show Survivor may be yesterday's news, but since another Survivor from the Australian Outback is in the works and a Survivor board game is expected in November, the phenomenon may have legs. As the most watched summer TV series in history (51 million viewers at the end), chances are that many of your students watched it. Hence the show could serve as grist for class discussions. Here are some thoughts.

I'm no expert, but I watched enough to get a feel for the Survivor game. Team members voted one contestant off the island each week until just one survivor remained. Although that game has been likened to the corporate jungle or a Darwinian survival-of-the-fittest contest, it is the way in which Survivor's incentives and constraints differed from those of a market economy that may be of most interest to students. To begin with, Survivor was a zero-sum game, with the sixteen contestants competing for the top prize of $1,000,000, and lesser amounts for the next few finishers. Contestant behavior did not affect the total prize money, only its distribution. The market economy, on the other hand, is a positive-sum game. Participants in a market economy also compete, but through production and exchange, they increase the total value of the pot, with the distribution based on each participant's productivity.

In the first half-dozen shows, contestants were divided into two teams, or "tribes," which competed in various games. The losing team had to vote one of its members off the island. Tribal success in some of the early competitions depended on the performance of the least able member of the tribe. For example, one contest required all team members to swim out to a buoy, dive for a chest on the ocean floor, then bring it ashore. Team members could not begin diving for the chest until all of them had reached the buoy, and they could not claim the chest on shore until all members placed their hands on it. In effect, all participants performed the same task in parallel. The contributions of all but the least able member of the team meant little or nothing towards the outcome. A single poor swimmer accounted for the team's loss. In the real world, even where production is a team effort, the task is typically based on some specialization and some division of labor. This goofy structure breeds team conflict, which makes for good TV, but it doesn't much mirror a market economy.

And Survivor's procedure of voting team members off the island bears little relation to market competition. By week five, four tribe members coalesced to vote others off the island. By eliminating the strongest outsider each week, these coalition members made it to the final four. In terms of a market economy, that would be like a group of producers forming a cartel to systematically eliminate the strongest rivals. That may occur with organized crime, where they bump off the competition, but it's illegal and probably impractical in market economies.

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