Posts

Course Reflection

My overall impression for the course is quite positive. Though this course is designed for undergraduate students, I still enjoy the class a lot. There are three parts that I want to talk about: assignments, class contents, and interactions. Firstly, assignments of this class are more than I expected, which is still fine for me. Blog posts every week are the most beneficial assignment in my opinion, which help me to digest what I learned from the class. Though writing blog is time consuming, since I have to think through the contents what I am going to discuss and which parts I want to focus on, I believe that is a good way for students to connect the new class contents to their old knowledge. Another gain for me is that I get a lot more chance to write essays and have feedback from Professor, which is a precious opportunity that I wouldn’t have from most graduate-degree courses. About the Excel homework, the difficulty is quite reasonable for me. Detailed instructions are provide...
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Triangular Principal-agent Model

Most of time, the tension between the agent and principal results from goal incongruence. The same reason causes problems in a triangle like principal-agent situation. Take my work experience two years ago in Colorado as an example, I was a crew leader who had to satisfy both my supervisors and my crew members. As I mentioned in the previous post, I attended the summer work and travel program and worked in a housekeeping department for three months. My job was to lead crew members to finish tasks that supervisors assigned. In that situation, my supervisors can be considered as the principal 1, and my crew members are considered as the principal 2. The principal 1’s goal is to finish cleaning cabins or lodge rooms as more as possible in the shortest time, and I am the agent who is supposed to help them finishing the goal. The principal 2’s goal is quite opposite to the principal 1’s goal, since most of housekeepers are international students who joined the program for fun and they ...
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Relate Cop Movies to Workplace Conflict

There are tons of cop movies. Some of them talk about the same thing: two partners paired up reluctantly, but end up helping each other and finish the mission. Such as Lethal Weapon (1987), Point Break (1991), Die Hard with a Vengeance (1995), Rush Hour (1998), Training Day (2001), Hot Fuzz (2007), 21 Jump Street (2012), 22 Jump Street (2014), Zootopia (2016) and even the incoming movie, Bright (2017). I don’t know whether people get tired of watching same plots in different cop movies again and again, at least I am still love watching cop movies. In those movies, most plots are like a disciplined officer needs to cooperate with another officer or civilian who is careless of rules. In the beginning, you can feel the tension between those two people since they are used to tackle tasks using their old methods. Conflicts occur often. However, their new challenge proves that old ways doesn’t work and they both need to learn something from their partner. To elaborate my illustrations, ...
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Team Production and the Problem of Cooperation

The ideas discussed in the three articles are interesting, they are about how people share belongings, how people perceive fairness, and how people act altruistically. I believe that these ideas are not only important on observing human behaviors, but can also be handy when applying them in organizations. Before I continue the discussion of the articles, I want to talk something I learned about people’s “identity” in our course project and previous posts. According to the paper I read in preparation for the course project, Identity and the Economics of Organizations, Akerlof and Kranton (2005) assert that people’s identity could influence their behaviors, which I think is highly correlated with the topics of the three articles. There are normally two identities, one is “insider” and another one is “outsider”. Insiders are keen on achieve goals aligned with their social category. Outsiders, on the contrary, are more likely to act against insiders’ interests. Social category divides...
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Job Choice Under Uncertainty

As I mentioned in the last few posts, a successful organization has to deal with goals, rules and participants. From the perspective of the organization, participants are one of uncertainties that the company can control with reasonable goals, well-defined rules. In short, good management can help companies to solve uncertainties in certain situations. What about individuals? How do a manager or an employee deal with uncertainties? In this post, I want to talk about what actions can an individual (me) take to lower uncertainties or risks. Based on the prompt given by Professor, the situation is that I am going to graduate and what will I do to reduce my uncertainty in job market. Let me begin from discussing my major, Economics, which is really not a risk-averse major. When I was going to graduate from my college, I talked to some of my professors that I’d like to purse my graduate degree so I can enhance my understanding of Economics and know more about how to apply economic know...
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Connecting the Dots

 A brief review to recap what I wrote previously. My first post is “Boot Camp Organization”, which is about my experience in Army and how Army could be related to organization operations. The second post, “Discussion About Opportunism”, is about how selfish person act to maximize their own profits regardless others, which may cause reduction on community’s welfare. “Knock Knock Housekeeping” is the third post talking about my experience as a crew leader in housekeeping department. The fourth post is about a hypothetical scenario which illustrates how the Illinibucks Program works. After reviewing those posts, I found it is quite easy to follow the logic. All posts have some relationships with organizations and discuss few critical components which companies should have. These components are goals, rules, and participants. I will explain them respectively below. Firstly, a good organization must have clear goals which are known by all managers or employees. In my first post...
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Illinibucks Program

Let’s say, the university has clear purposes on issuing Illinibucks. One goal could be solving unfair issues happened on campus, such as some undergraduate students spend four years trying to register for popular courses but still can’t get one. Also, the campus is running this Illinibucks program to bring students better academic experience instead of doing some weird things that normal universities wouldn’t do, such as holding football game one Friday or having unofficial St. Patrick Day on campus. The school realizes these problems are severe and makes its mind up to maximize students’ welfare prior to maximize its own profit. Without these proper purposes, there is no reason that the university wants to circulate Illinibucks, and students wouldn’t bother to give Illinibucks a try. Few problems that administrators want to solve by issuing Illinibucks. Firstly, administrators hope that limited course spots are taken by students who are most willing to take those courses. To solv...
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