Harold Demsetz

Harold Demsetz is an economists who studied at the University of Illinois and Northwestern University.  Demsetz's specialized in and is the founder of the managerial economics field which uses economic topics to solve issues in businesses.  The most famous paper Demsetz's has published and has also become one of the most cited papers in the field of economics is "Production, Information Cost, and Economic Organization" (1972).  Unfortunately Demsetz passed on January 4, 2019, however his legacy and contribution to the economic field makes him one of the greatest economists of the 20th Century.

Comments

  1. Professor ArvanSeptember 6, 2019 at 10:52 AM

    Yes, Demsetz did foundational work in the field we are studying. If our class size were somewhat smaller I would have you write a review of his 1972 paper. As it is, just keeping up with all the blogs will be a lot of work for me. But if it piques your interest your might read that paper anyway, just for you won benefit.

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Organization and Transaction Cost

I worked at a company in Rome, Italy as an intern previously.  The companies' goal was to make the processes of getting foods from farms directly to restaurants and stores much more efficient through the use of data analysis and automation.  Initially, it was difficult for me to get a grasp of the environment and structure of the company especially since I'm not fluent in Italian.  But after working there for about three months, I believe I have a somewhat good understanding of the organizational structure of the company and the transaction costs it took in order to limit the amount of problems that occurred. As for the organizational structure of the company, the highest level was the CEO, and under the CEO were three main sectors, and then each sector had many branches that stemmed from it, each of which followed the order that were given to them by the higher up people in the main sectors.  The CEO mostly took care of many of the big business conversation with o...
Read more

Reflection

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 ...
Read more

Opportunism

When I think of the word "opportunism", taking advantage of circumstances, I think about a story that my father told me a couple of years ago.  Over the years, my father has told me many stories about his life, but this one has always stuck with me which is about the difficult choices he had to make before University and all the way until when he was getting his first job after graduating from his PhD program. Here is some background information about my father before I tell the story.  My father grew up with in a very poor family in Hong Kong and he was the second oldest of five siblings, three boys and two girls.  My father was also the first person ever within the extended family tree to go to University (getting into college in Hong Kong back then was very difficult and the available spots were very limited).  So before my father got accepted into University in Hong Kong, he had a job available to him which was a job in a factory.  The money he would ear...
Read more