Topic 14 - Productivity Experiment

On Tuesday, our class engaged in a market productivity experiment. We selected a manager, a quality check manager, and an accountant. The rest of us are workers. The company starts off with one worker making widgets. We count the number of widgets a worker makes at the end of each day (which is one minute). The next day, the company adds one more worker to the workforce. This experiment is supposed to show that as the number of workers increase, the number of widgets made should also increase. The marginal product of increasing by one worker should increase, but should have a diminishing product near the end. I was a worker that was added on the 9th or 10th day. The company has a limited amount of technology to make the widgets and sometimes the workers are fighting over an equipment. Some errors in the experiment are that Gary, our quality checker, is too strict on the quality of the widgets. And the workers' skills are inconsistent. Sometimes they look good and sometimes they just simply look bad. Therefore, in our experiment, we did not really see the expected results. We did try to use specialization. However, it turned out that we made too many papers and we only have two staplers. Therefore, the process became really slow.