Harold Demsetz Econ 490 Fall 2019

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...