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Final Blog Post

I came into this course not knowing really anything at all about the economics of organizations, which is why I decided to take this class. I think that the biggest takeaway from the class would be the lesson on risk preference. I never thought about how much the choices that we make now impact the future so much. I think it made me realize that I currently have the ability to take risks in my youth more than I will be able to later on down the road. I need to capitalize now while I can and do things that may help me in the future such as apply to jobs that are a “reach” or join organizations and do things with my time that may benefit me later. I did enjoy the approach that the class took in terms of the conversation and the ability to engage with the teacher and other students. It made sure that the students had the right takeaways from the lecture because we were engaging directly with the teacher, who could correct us if we were wrong. As for the blog posts, I thought that they we
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Principle-Agent Model

As I move along with my education, I see more and more examples of how models, while completely necessary are often times far from perfect. This is a perfect example of that. It is important to simplify things but then to be able to rationalize them in the real world. While I don’t think that I’ve ever participated in a “triangle like arrangement”, I think that I have witnessed plenty of these situations in my lifetime. The example that I will focus on today will be about the chef that my fraternity hired when I was a freshman. He was an agent of both the members of the fraternity and the company that she was hired through, Campus Culinary Solutions (CCC). There were many issued that ended up arising because the members of our fraternity did not see good performance in the same way that the company did. To us, good performance was three good meals a day. It was also always preferable if the meals were tasty and edible (sometimes this wasn’t the case). We also expected there to be e
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Conflict

For this blog post I will write about a conflict that I experienced while I was working at my internship last summer. I was an “Operations Intern” assigned to the operations team in the Navy department. The problem was that I wasn’t assigned a specific task or assigned to an individual person. This left the whole team assigning me small projects without communicating with one another. This put me in a bad position because I looked like a slow intern that could not finish a project in a timely manner. It also caused problems between my higher ups because they would want their projects done first, pushing the assignments other people assigned me to the bottom of my pile.              The problem became apparent when I brought the issue up to one of my superiors that I felt close with. They had no idea that I was being used by almost everyone in the office. He quickly sent out an email where he explained what had been going on. When the problem became apparent to the entire offic
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Discipline

I believe that there is a time and a place where certain punishments are more acceptable or make more sense. For example, I believe that people who commit heinous crimes such as murder or grand theft should be sent to prison, or be put on the chain gang. While I do believe that this undoubtedly hardens them rather than reforms them, I think that they may be beyond the point of reformation and will act more civilized due to fear of going back to prison, not because they were reformed.              I think that more moderate punishments do work if the circumstances aren’t as serious. There should be a scale upon which punishments are handed out depending on how much the action impacted society. For example, I was caught stealing a pencil from a book fair when I was in the second grade. My punishment was extremely moderate. I had to sit out of recess for a week. I can’t think of a more fair punishment, and the end result was me never stealing anything again because sitting out of r
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Income Risk

The decisions I make now will set habits for myself that I will follow for the rest of my life. It’s important to pay close attention to my spending habits now, in order to properly manage income risk for the future. There’s no way to tell exactly how much I’ll be earning as a salary these next few years, or even the rest of my life, so the only thing I can do now is to be responsible with how much I work and spend.  Being an econometrics and quantitative economics major over the last four years, I think I’ve grasped a pretty sufficient idea of how the market works, and a responsible ratio of how much money I earn to how much I can spend. But it’s much more than spending habits, different experiences and choices I make now will have heavy influence over my income in the future. Being involved in greek life has helped me network myself to a great number of people during my time here on campus. Getting involved, even in social organizations, is a great way to network yourself and put
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Illinibucks

I think that the idea of there being an initial allocation of these supposed Illinibucks is not a bad idea. If this were the case, then students would all be on an even playing field. That being said; they could use their Illinibucks to serve whatever needs they feel are most important to them. For example, if someone truly hated early classes or needed a perfect schedule, they could use their Illinibucks to be one of the first time ticket of the semester. On the other hand, if someone did not care about their schedule but it was important for them to frequently meet with their advisor, then they could skip the line and meet with their advisor whenever they want. This is where the idea of transfer pricing comes into play, I believe. Students would have the option of how to allocate these benefits within their own University experience. While I do not think that this is a necessary implementation, I don’t think that it would necessarily hurt. I think that aside from class registr
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Blog Post 3

Playing sports all of my life was amazing – sports have and always will be my passion. The downside, though, is when you’re on a team that’s facing adversity on a daily basis. It’s not easy, it tests your limits of the team and you as an individual. Growing up in a small town, we didn’t have as much talent as some of the other suburbs, which was extremely difficult to deal with. We were just a small group of guys playing the sport we loved, which was baseball. Baseball was my go to when I was down or struggling with anything, but the fact that we weren’t as successful as many other local teams definitely affected me. It wasn’t fair; how could we control where we lived and who we got to play the game we loved with? Although I wanted to move at times to try to get on a better team, I was not able to and had to handle what I was given. I trained harder and harder every single day in efforts of making myself better, but my team especially. Throughout my four years of high-school, we strug
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