Exit, Voice, and Loyalty

Exit, Voice, and Loyalty Albert Hirschman

What constitutes legitimate protest?  How is this constructed?      If we continue as customers or members of an organization, we are seen to be tacitly supporting it; voice is seen as hypocritical.      (37) I don’t follow that you need to remain a customer to use voice      (65) they might not be kindly disposed toward the firm that has disappointed them, but they have cut themselves off through exit from all or much of the influence they might exert"

70 Duopoly: when one party moves toward center, its extremists have no exit, so they use voice. Thus the Republicans, untethered from their tea party extremist wing, have lost a powerful component of voice but are free to move to the center. Maybe we need a liberal extreme movement. 

I want to return to other peoples’ children; let’s think about what happens when exit does not preclude the use of voice

The logic of civil rights—boycotts. Using voice from without. 

Slack is power. (e.g. An effective police state knows enough to exert just enough power in just the right places)

What happens when some of the value is in my relationship? I guess this is loyalty.

Generous return policies have the effect of magnifying voice. We feel like we can do something when we are dissatisfied; the company gets information.  It is to a company’s advantage to create the illusion of more powerful voice than truly exists. This dissuades customers from choosing to exit.

Could we analyze the Missouri football players’ situation with respect to voice and exit?

“The presence of the exit alternative can therefore tend to atrophy the development of the art of voice.” (43)

Do the first to exit also tend to be the ones who would exercise voice? (45) If so, then the same parents who will pull out their kids for private school are the ones who would kick up a fuss about poor quality. 

“Is it possible that the customers who drop out first as price increases are not the same as those who drop out first when quality decreases?” (47)     

Yes, you can express quality changes as quantity changes, but the ratio will be different for different customers. (48)

“connoisseur goods” (49) consumer surplus—how much more value you get for a good than what you pay. The larger your consumer surplus, the more likely you are to choose voice as the price goes up, but the more likely you are to choose exit as the quality goes down. 

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So the availability of private and public schools will tend to sort consumers into “quality-sensitive” (those who have the cultural/social capital to be able to extract use value from education) and “price-sensitive” (those with neither cultural nor financial capital). When the price gets worse, the poor will leave. When the quality gets worse, the rich will leave. In other words, the schools will reproduce social class.  (52) (image/png)

This ought to be the basis of examining the question of whether exercising one’s privilege hurts those without privilege. (e.g. express lanes; white privilege)

56: An almost monopoly may be less preferable than a true monopoly,because the most vocal critics will be drawn off.  (image/png)

(image/png) (image/png) Note on 60: Another means of dealing with the most demanding customers is to give them (and just them) special quality

Loyalty reduces the tendency of the quality-sensitive to exit first The effectiveness of voice is strengthened by the possibility of exit (83)

100 Awareness that your exit may lead to further decline in quality might prevent you from leaving. 

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How is the relative power of voice from within and voice from without in our culture? I don’t feel like we have a culture of membership. 

Success as —physical–exit(108) 109 black power rejects exit as neutralizing voice (image/png)

Extreme reluctance of Americans in public office to resign in protest against policies with which they disagree (114) 115 Domestication of dissenters

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In analyzing how a US administration could be made more responsive to voice and exit, how can we frame this in the patterns described below? In what sense is this a market?

So what to do? Change the way feedback mechanisms work in the institutions we care about? Or raise the cost of exit?      Particularly non-elite schools (image/png)