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...

Prior to coming to college, I played soccer for eight years.  And for those eight years, my teammate mostly comprised of the same people.  So over those eight years, all the players grew pretty close to each other.  As for the structure of the team, I would say that it is most similar to a combination of the Dual Authority and the All-Channel Network Models.  What I mean by this is, similar to the All-Channel-Network, all the players were able to freely communicate with one another.  But also similar to the Dual Authority Model, the team's highest authority were the coaches while the second level of authority were the four team captains and the last level of authority were the other players on the team.  The dynamic of the team was pretty standard in my opinion for any sports team.  The regular players and team captains would freely be able to communicate with each other.  But there was somewhat a kind of barrier between the all the players and ...

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...

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...

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.