Harold Demsetz Econ 490 Fall 2019

A personal experience I have had with conflict in a group dynamics within a work setting was during my two-three month internship at a company in Rome.  For background information, the company I interned for worked on making the processes of getting foods from farms directly to restaurants and stores much more efficient through the use of data analysis and automation.  The company had three main sectors which were, the delivery sector, the trading sector, and the technology sector.  I worked on a team within the technology sector which was working on the processes of data analysis and automating the ordering/processes of the food. And the team I worked in had five interns including myself which I will name David, Kevin, Ryan, Lucy, and Harold for myself.   Also all the interns had a data analysis and coding background to some degree, some of the interns were more experienced in the data analysis while others were more experienced in coding.   The tea...

There have been several experiences in my life in which I have witnessed the higher up discipline someone.  One occasion was when I was involved in a research project in which four student research assistant including myself were working under a professor.  After about two months into the research project, one of the research assistants began to get busy or lazy and started to not contribute as much to the project and would sometimes not even show up to the weekly project meetings.  After a while of this behavior happening, the professor pulled the student outside of the meeting room after one of our weekly meeting so he could have a private talk with the student.  After that, the student told us in our group chat that the Professor basically said to him, "I know you may be getting busier with balancing research and school work, but when you agreed to take this research assistant position, you agreed to dedicate a certain weekly amount of time to it (it was 10-15 hou...

I found the three article to be really interesting and many concepts in them actually shined some light on many of the experiences I have had in the past.  In particular, I found the first article about sharing the marbles to be intriguing when it talked about "everyone bearing the burden" when a mistake is made.  This is statement feels very relateable to me because when I played soccer and lacrosse in middle school through high school, this concept of "everyone bearing the burden" when is mistake is made was a big emphasis that the coaches tried to convey to us. An example of "everyone bearing the burden" is that in soccer or lacrosse we had specific strategic plays that we would sometimes run during games.  And when someone messed up really badly or made in a mistake in other situations, the coaches would get angry and would always yell the same thing which was "everyone get on the sideline".  These five words were something every player dre...

When I first came to the College I was Biology major intending to go to medical school to become a doctor which was a decision I made because I thought I would enjoy it.  However after my first year, I realized that becoming a doctor was not what I wanted to do and just sort of randomly changed my major to Economics because I already had credits for some of the courses from high school.  But most importantly, I changed my major to Economics because it would cost around two thousands dollars less than being a biology major due to the lab and other fees so I thought I would just change to an Economics major and then figure out what I want to do and then change to that major later.  During the beginning of my sophomore year, I was totally lost in what I wanted to do in the future and I wasn't really thinking about choosing my major in terms of the money I would earn the future, instead I was looking for a major that I enjoyed.  However during the time I was taking an ...

When looking back through my blog posts I did see some aspects that were connected among all the posts.  Although each prompts for the blogs posts may be seemingly different, I have realized that many of the posts can be related to transaction costs in relation to decision making and efficiency.  For example in the Illinibucks post, Illinibucks were to be used in order to "skip the line", however the Illinibucks were of limited quantity to each student.  In this post, I essentially wrote about how the use of Illinibucks is an optional decision for students in order to make a transaction cost that would make certain situations more efficient.  However the efficiency could be different in different types of situations such as the use of IlliniBucks would make the situation more efficient just for the individual themselves or it could make the situation more socially efficient by letting those who are the most desperate in those situations use their Illinibucks to skip ...

The use of Illinibucks for the sole purpose of moving to the head of the line would have many uses for many of the issues that I have run into during my time at this University.  Among many of those issues, some of the bigger ones that Illinibucks could be used for are who get's help from the instructors or teacher assistants first and registering to be on a waiting list for courses that are already full.  However, even though Illinibucks could be used in these certain situations, whether the      pre-specified prices are set too low or too high could have drastically different affects. The only time I have faced the first issue, which is who gets help from the instructors or teacher assistants faster, is during my coding courses.  For these coding courses, there are a lot of students and that means there are a lot of students with a lot of questions that have to be asked at office hours.  And during each office hours there is only one teach...