Elinor Ostrom Econ 490 fall 2017

From observation, I can confidently conclude that the triangle principal agent often causes a dilemma. The service provider is usually the agent in a principal-agent relationship. It is the expectation of the agent to conform to what the principal wants, and most times the principal delegate's authority to the agent to perform some service on its behalf. My example of the triangle approach is from witnessing others experience it. Like I have mentioned in a couple of my previous posts, I was a student ambassador at my previous school where I worked closely with the admission team to ensure that student registration went smoothly. In a school setting or even in the corporate world, there are almost always two principals. The first principle is from the executive level who makes most of the decisions on how the school or company should operate, and the second principal is the customers or clients who are getting the services. The agent is the service provider that interacts with the

The African Student Organization on campus have six executive board members with different positions and responsibilities. The Exec members includes the president, vice-president, treasurer, secretary, publicist secretary,  and social chair. We all agreed to work together to complete task as we all had the same goal of improving the organization by creating more events that interests our members. However, this wasn't the case as one of the exec member was not conforming to the group. This behavior ended up causing conflict especially because we did not address it early on as we identified the problem.  The publicity secretary, Abigail hardly completed her task, even when we all mutually agreed on a deadline. She barely showed up to meetings or gave anyone heads up about why she couldn't complete her task. It was frustrating because her main roles was promoting events on our social media account. She was hardly doing any of this, and other executive member had to pick up her

Anytime I think of gift exchange, I automatically tie it to the phrase " I would scratch your back if you scratch mine". Gift exchange in a non-economic term reminds me of Secret Santa (as Christmas season is fast-approaching). You buy a gift for someone and the person  buys a gift for you in return. Sometimes, you get the same monetary value for the gift if you measure it. Other times, You might see that you spent more effort and money buying someone a gift, while the other person doesn't. Of course, this is completely different in Economics as gift exchange is based on the positive relationship between workers effort levels and wages.  Now, to the first article on How to Get the Rich to Share the Marbles. It focuses on team productivity and successful outcome. For the share-the- spoils, the kids were able to pull the rope together and get more marbles compared to pulling the roles individually and only getting more ropes. The interesting fact is that the kids were ab

   The fear of uncertainty is real. Since the beginning of senior year, that is about two months ago, there is no day I don't imagine what my life after graduation would be. I feel like the tension hit me most during the business career fair. It was only a few weeks after we resumed, and job deadlines were due or fast approaching. I heard my friends talk about how they already have Full-Time offers from companies they interned for this summer. I also heard other friends talk about the many upcoming interviews they had. At that point, I knew I had to quit slacking, get my resume ready, and start applying to jobs. I am still on the job search, but I believe I have come a long way from the first day of Senior year. I have grown from limiting my options of working in a consulting company to applying to different companies where I can contribute my analytical skills. Now, I would describe in the next few paragraphs how I have made decisions with the hope of it paying off..    My dream

I was reading through my posts, and the different concepts that stuck out to me were transaction costs, team work, opportunism. I can see the pattern of working together with a team in most of them, and how organizational structure influences it. For example, the prompt about organization structure, and what makes a team successful is similar because they both helped me analyze my past experiences working with others. Although I did not give the same examples while writing the blog posts, it definitely helped me reflect on how organizational structure impacts the outcome of a successful team. In fact, reading chapter 5 of B&D has helped me easily identify that one of the factor that determines the success of a team structure is the number of people in the team, and how information is being passed and processed. Specifically, looking back at my post about organizational structure, I can spot some things I did not consider at first while writing the post. The organizational structu

    In a school setting where one has the advantage of moving up the line, IlliniBucks might be extremely useful. There is a possibility of a high demand for IlliniBucks since there is no additional charge for receiving the allocation. Some factors to consider when determining exclusive access can be through merit-based and community involvement. The level of community involvement and merit-based can be joint that is allowing outstanding students with academic achievement, engagement, service and demonstrated leadership on campus have access to IlliniBucks. This way students are not only measured by their GPA, but their overall qualification.  It might also be unfair to put a class restriction because it encourages everyone to perform well regardless of whether they are freshmans or seniors. Candidates would be selected every year through nominations from students or faculty and staff members. This can be similar to the way they pick the senior 100 honorary students every year. There w