Elinor Ostrom Econ 490 fall 2017

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 he...

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...