Ronald Coase Econ 490 fall 2017

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, ...

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...