Michael Jensen Econ 490 Fall 2019

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...

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 bee...

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 resu...