Francis Edgeworth Econ 490 Fall 2017

I have been watching Seinfeld lately and the adventures of Elaine Benes at work feel appropriate for this post on team dynamic. I will give some background as to what is currently happening in the series. Elaine works for the J. Peterman Catalogue that provides the latest trends for its readers. One-day J. Peterman has a panic attack and flees to Burma unexpectedly. The staff have no idea for how long J. Peterman will be out. As a result, there is chatter going on for who will lead the J. Peterman Catalogue. Elaine meets her friends, Jerry, George, and Kramer at Jerry’s apartment. She informs them of what is going on at work, and how she does not have a boss anymore. This leads Kramer to interject and give her the idea of becoming the boss. Elaine is hesitant at first, but Kramer gives her a pep talk of being confident. He uses his own example of how he always wanted to learn Karate was too afraid to join, and now he is the best karate fighter at the dojo. This inspires E...

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...