Francis Edgeworth Econ 490 Fall 2017

In this week’s blog post we read three articles from the New York Times. The first article is about equality and is explained through the use of marbles. We are given insight on how a psychologist designed a marble experiment in Germany to test if children will share their goods or not. I feel that it is quite difficult to manipulate children as they are innocent and have not fully understood the concept of greed and selfishness. In the experiment, 75% of the children almost immediately shared the marbles equally with one another when they had to ‘work’ for the marbles together. This was not the case however when children had cups with marbles already inside. In this case, the children believed in the concept of ‘finders keepers’ and did not share as they did previously.   I find this a bit surprising, as I feel that in the adult world if someone comes across a large sum of money they tend to have a social responsibility to share. I believe this is the case as they have the...

I started to think about managing future income risk after my sophomore year of college. Prior, to that I did not know what I wanted to study or what my aspirations were. I was an undeclared major for my first year at Purdue, and that gave me the time to experience different classes. I had decided that studying economics would be the best fit for me as I had planned on receiving an MBA in the future. Hence, I transferred to UIUC to pursue degrees in Economics and Statistics for in state tuition and its strong STEM and business programs. I did not go to UIUC from the beginning because I was rejected when I applied from high school. The first organization I joined on campus was OTCR Consulting, this gave me the opportunity to be surrounded by some of the brightest minds at UIUC. Initially I though I would be interested in management consulting as a profession, but I realized I always though finance was interesting. For example, when I turned 18 I opened my first brokerage account a...

I feel the prompts for the blog posts have been designed in such a way that a student must recall information and make connections from previous classes to write a quality blog post. I believe we started off with transactions costs and slowly transitioned into opportunism. By the time we hit the third and fourth blog posts, I feel my posts were heavily influenced by these posts naturally. To elaborate, I feel I brought up the themes of opportunism and transaction costs organically rather than forcefully. Although the prompts did guide us briefly to referencing those concepts. For example, in my post on working in a team I referenced the concept of opportunism frequently and I noticed some of my teammates referenced transaction costs. In my next post about Illinibucks I had referenced transaction costs heavily and opportunism briefly. Going off last Thursdays class session, I believed this week’s blog post would be on creativity in the workplace. This topic would have been interes...

This seems like a very interesting topic, and I feel it relates to the previous prompts as well. I feel that the idea of Illinibucks seems like a practical one. This concept reminds me of the café credits concept a bit, as everyone has a limited amount. I feel that the practical uses of Illinibucks would be to get better seats in a lecture, sporting event, priority registration, food at the dining hall, a better parking spot and seat at the library. These are just some of the uses I could think of. I feel this concept would only be useful if you want to prioritize one or two things. Since every student has the same amount of Illinibucks it would seem to make sense to spend it   on one or two things rather than hoard it as there is no incentive to currently hold on to Illinibucks. For example, I personally would spend all my Illinibucks on priority registration for Stat400. In the previous blog posts I spoke about having to be opportunistic to gain registration as it was quite dif...

I am part of a consulting organization on campus. We work with real clients and as a result it is integral that we meet all deadlines and provide our best work. In the beginning of the semester we have multiple projects to choose from based on our interests. The projects are sourced by the head partner. In a way this partner is the CEO of the firm. Next we have general partners who are in charge of recruitment, professional development, social and among others. These can be related to the CFO, CMO and etc. The next in line are the project managers who are the head in charge with each consulting project. The project managers are selected by the board through an interview process. The project managers make sure the project gets completed on time and that the consultants work together as a team. As a result, I feel this is close to a one boss hierarchy. However, at the same time the culture of the firm is very open and even employees are allowed to bring their own initiatives and sign t...