Five Ways to Rate

When we have people and orgs do things for us, we need ways to rate them. So we can pick who to have do what, and how much to have them do. And how we evaluate suppliers matters a lot, as they put great effort into looking good according to the metrics we use.

Results – When we buy a pound of roast chicken, or have someone to mow our lawn, we can pretty directly pay for the things we want. The more aspects of what we want that we can articulate and verifiably measure, the more of them we can specify in a contract. When action is risky, not always reliably producing desired results, paying for results means those who do things face payment risk, which they don’t like. And competitors might find a way to produce better results and displace them, a risk they also don’t like.

Record – If we get similar things over and over in a relatively stable context, and also stick with one provider for a while, then we can see a track record of how well they do for us. So we can pay them more of a steady fee not as closely tied to what we get, and drop them when their record seems unsatisfactory. We might switch between providers to sample quality, or hear gossip from associates about their experiences. Groups like Consumer Reports can collect stats on overall customer results. Suppliers face lower payment risks here, though still substantial competition risks.

Prestige – When data on customer results isn’t available, we may rely on a general opinion based on many weak clues about the quality of relevant people and orgs. For people, such clues include wealth, attractiveness, intelligence, social savvy, well-connectedness, etc. For orgs, there is also name-recognition, sponsorships, prestigious projects, and many other elements. Early education and training varies in prestige and adds to individual prestige. When individuals affiliate with orgs, the prestige of each adds to the prestige of the other. I count network effects under prestige; you use the system everyone else respects, As prestige is usually pretty stable over time, suppliers chosen by prestige tend to have a secure position.

Loyalty – While we less often admit it, we often choose suppliers to show our loyalty to “our sides”. Those we choose make sure to signal which sides they are on, and we help to ensure that our associates see those signals, so they can credit us for loyalty. It matters less to us that these signals actually correlate with the things we claim that our side seeks to achieve, as long as they are widely seen as clearly marking folks as on our side relative to other sides. The more stable are sides and signals, the more security a supplier can gain by clearly picking a side.

Procedure – Often specialists create official procedures re how to do something, and rules saying what not to do along the way. Then suppliers can brag to customers that they follow good procedures, they may be required by regulators to do so, and may be punished by courts as negligent if they deviate. Civil servants, for example, are typically paid and promoted based on following official procedures, and on internal politics, not on rates or results. Divisions within private orgs also try to become silos evaluated via rules and procedures, not results. Suppliers tend to like being evaluated by stable rules and procedures that can be achieved with limited effort, as this ensures high job/supplier stability.

While all these methods have their place, the first one, results, seems the most solid and hardest to corrupt from the customers’ point of view. Yes there are obstacles to applying it widely, but such problems are often exaggerated to excuse the other methods. Suppliers would generally rather be evaluated via prestige, loyalty, and procedure, as once these are established they can usually look forward to long stable lucrative relationships, unthreatened by upstart competitors.

I want to find ways to tell people that we could pay for results far more than we now do. Yes, suppliers would resist such a switch, but we customers would get more of what we wanted.