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Final Post

Looking back on the course up until this point and what I learned from it, I cannot say it has been enlightening, nor can I say that it was a waste of time. There are somethings like the principal agent model which I had no knowledge of beforehand, but I do not say believe I have fully retained the knowledge of it. Admittedly, I have not been entirely diligent when it comes to truly studying and understanding these concepts, but I still believe that I should know a bit more about them then I currently do. As far as my opinion on the structure of the course, my thoughts remain unchanged. Having the learning take place outside of the class and only discussing it after the homework regarding it has been turned in just does not seem like a wise decision.  The discussions are not very helpful for several reasons. One is the lack of people who bother to show up, meaning less ideas and concerns are raised. Another shortcoming is the general lack of interest within the discussions themselve
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Principal Agent

While I have never really been an agent of multiple principals myself, I do know that my father acts as one due to his job. My father works at IBM, working both to secure deals and to help with both designing and implementing things that client companies want. To this end, he is an agent of both IBM and the client company that he is working with. While I do not know the specifics of what he is instructed to do for the companies, I can only assume that my father’s goal as an IBM agent is to gain a deal that is the most beneficial to IBM while at the same time making sure that the client company is getting the service they desire while not spending enough money and effort to make the deal not worth it. In simpler terms, one side is trying to spend less for a service while the other is trying to get more for performing that service. Attempting to reach a middle ground is the role my father performs. In this case, despite the inherent contradiction between the two objectives, it is simply
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Group conflicts

When exploring the origins of a conflict and how it played out, I will use a fictional example based on the lore of the game Warhammer 40,000. This event is called the Horus Heresy and in simplest terms is a war between demigods and their armies who either chose to remain loyal to their father or betray him. Each major individual grew up on a different world and thus had radically different and often conflicting values and morals, leading to rivalries and a general hatred for each other. This was compounded by two major events. The first was when their father, a man known only as the emperor, had one of his son’s and his army burn down another’s greatest achievement and force him to kneel to destroyer, all for worshiping the emperor as a god. The second was the emperor abandoning his children during a crusade he was leading to work on a project he refused to tell anyone about. This paved the way for half of his 20 children to doubt him and rebel. I will now explain these events in mor
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Rehabilitation and punishment

When it comes to punishment, the method executed greatly affects the expected results, intentionally or otherwise. While a punishment may be intended to make a relationship more stable, and therefore more profitable, pushing a person too hard will instead make them less compatible with others. As such, it is important to find a moderate punishment that incentivizes the troublesome individual to reform without being so harsh as to make the problem worse. I will look at some examples both relating to my own life and fictional to determine what sort of punishment would be the most fitting. While a severe punishment may more damaging than helpful, the threat of the punishment might be more useful. While I was working over the summer, one of my coworkers was caught slacking off and was given a warning. If they were caught one more time they would be fired. After that, they became much more productive as they knew that they would be monitored more closely. This punishment has several bene
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Team production and gift exchange

There are several examples of team production that I can think of that relate to at least one of the New York Times articles. The first example will be buying a gift for someone. In our family, it is expected that everyone buy a person’s birthday gift with their own money, or pay equal parts in a more expensive gift. This relates to the article about “sharing the marbles” and fairness, both in effort and reward. The effort in this example is the personal amount of money that an individual spends, while the reward is being able to claim that the gift came from you. There are times where one person will pay the full price of the gift but include everyone’s name in it, but this is done with the agreement that everyone else will compensate the buyer with what they would have payed had they all purchased it together. Although this is not the only time when team production occurs in my family. Another instance of team production would be when my father, my brother and I all assembled a dr
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Income risk

I have been aware of risks to my income for some time and have determined many of my actions in the past, present and future to be based around the least amount of risk to achieve the most preferable outcome. Even choosing to come to this university over all the other ones I had been accepted to was a choice where I took my future into consideration. While it is true that I would need to take out more loans to come here than some of the other schools due to the amount I would receive in aid and scholarships, I still choose to come here as it meant that there was a higher likelihood of being able to get a job that pays enough money to remove these debts within a couple of years. Additionally, my actions since I first began attending the university of Illinois have also been made with thoughts towards the future. While I did intend to originally major in computer science and get a job coding software, I ended up declaring for a major in sociology with a minor in economics. Despite thi
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Connecting the dots

Looking back through my blog posts, I find that they are unrelated to each other. While at least part of it can be attributed to my blog posts being incorrect about the topics at hand, the actual topics themselves seemed unrelated in the first place. No real connections to the course are present beyond just answering the prompts. The topics discussed in the posts are only brought up in class after the fact so any overlapping examples that might possibly exist in any of these posts or any future posts would be entirely coincidental. To my understanding, things like opportunism and management have nothing to do with each other. This is not the only way in which my blog posts feel disconnected. The blog posts also feel disconnected from the themes of the course. This may be in part to my understanding of the themes and the lack thereof but the point still stands. Perhaps it is just due to the way I learn but for me, learning the fundamental principles and concepts of something through
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