Ronald Coase Econ 490 fall 2017

I visited the United States for the very first time in the summer of 2014, not for travel but for work. There is program called J1 program or Summer Work and Travel program, which is specially designed for international students who are interested in American culture and willing to spend their summer working in America. So, I applied for the program, got few exams, passed few interviews, and flew to USA to work as a… housekeeper. The following three months I was working in a resort located in Colorado. The main duty of housekeepers is, no doubt, keeping houses clean. Unlike those housekeepers I usually saw in hotels who work alone with a housekeeping cart, housekeepers in our resort worked as teams. The supervisors of housekeeping department assigned team arrangements every morning. Each team had a crew leader and four to five crew members. Before I became a crew leader, I didn’t feel much about how a team operates, I just did my jobs that my crew leader assigned to me. Yet I beca...

The first idea come to my mind when I am thinking about opportunism is the tragedy of the commons. The tragedy is about how people’s act when limited common goods are provided; without proper regulations, people are tended to consume common goods as much as they can and waste up most of the resource. The common trait of being an opportunist and wasting common goods is that both are totally legal. You may not even feel bad if you are a person doesn’t care about moral ethics a lot. Even if that being an opportunism is not illegal, it does harm our communities or societies. Just like the tragedy that people spoil all common goods provided by the government. There was an example just happened few days ago in my class of game theory. Professor wanted to play an anonymous game with students, game rules are clearly given: all students can choose either 5 free points or 20 free points added to their next assignments; however, nobody gets free points if four or more students select 20 ...

It was the end of June 2014, I just graduated from college, feeling my bright future is awaiting me. Well… that sense of victory didn’t last too long. Three days later, I was on the bus which takes privates to the boot camp: it was the compulsory military service that every man in my country has to fulfill. That summer turned out to be the worst summer I’ve ever had. The boot camp was a 30-days orientation for new recruits. The squad leader showed us how their organization, Army, works, and rules were clearly given to us. Follow the rules then you are free from troubles; break the rules then not only you but all squad will be punished. Sounds fair enough to follow the rules, however, some privates were preferred to try some bold moves and we were punished consequently. That was the time I realized how people are insanely irrational in the real life. I bet those privates haven’t learned Economics before, not to mention prisoner’s dilemma of game theory. What we did was like a game ...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ronald_Coase Ronald Harry Coase, born in 1910 and died in 2013, an English economist well known for his contribution to Institutional Economics. In fact, Coase wasn’t aiming to be an economist in the beginning of his academic life; He got his bachelor commerce degree when he attended the London School of Economics. In there, Coase was exposed to Economics for the very first time. His professor, Arnold Plant introduced Adam Smith’s invisible hand to Coase in a seminar. Professor Arnold showed Coase how a competitive economy uses pricing mechanism to achieve equilibrium. And it was the time Coase started thinking, what if the so-call invincible hand works so well, why there are abundant firms and organizations existing in markets? He wondered why don’t people just trade to each other as an independent. In 1931, Coase received Sir Ernest Cassel Travelling Scholarship and visited University of Chicago. During his exchange in the United States, he st...