Transfer Price

While the idea of illinibucks is a rather interesting scenario, some further specifications of the scenario itself need to be made before a conclusion can be drawn. For example, how much each service costs, do all services cost the same amount, and how many illinibucks are allocated to each student all play a factor in how I would spend them. For the sake of this blog post we will presume that the flat total of illinibucks is 1000 per semester and that each service has its own price. In the rest of the post, I shall mention what services I believe that this hypothetical policy should be applied to as well as how I would use them and any possible consequences of a price that is too high or too low. 
As far as services go, I feel that illinibucks are applicable to just about any service that does not already have a priority allocation system. That includes things like using the computer labs, renting things from the various dorms, the use of private rooms in student libraries and the speed at which you are addressed during tutoring, as well as having a tutor work only with you. All these services would cost differing amounts of illinibucks, with minor benefits like a room at the library costing 5 illinibucks while renting something like a fan for a dorm room or getting a private tutoring session at a tutoring center could cost 40 illinibucks and 35 illinibucks respectively, with the latter increasing to 50 illinibuckss during exam time. Of course, there are some inherent problems with this system.
First is the issue of pricing. While I mentioned hypothetical prices in the previous article, I just pulled those numbers out of my head without considering things like costs and benefits to the university and how they are altered based on price. Ignoring the fact that the university would not get any benefit no matter what due to the fact that they are not charging students anything for them, the amount of illinibucks needed per service must be high enough to be justify the university’s provision of the service while the service itself must be worthwhile enough to warrant the student using their finite amount of illinibucks on it. If the price of a service is too low, the university will not bother providing it, as the cost outweighs the benefit. On the other hand, make the price too high and students will not spend illini bucks on it, instead using them for something else. However, there is another problem even beyond just the pricing of the various services that illinibucks could be used for.
Hypothetically speaking, it is possible and in fact highly probable that two or more students will wish to use a certain service at the same time. While there are a couple of solutions for this issue, they are all problematic. The first would be to simply operate on a first come first serve basis. Unfortunately, the implementation of illinibucks is meant to replace such a system, so using that policy means illinibucks do nothing but add an extra step to the process. The other solution is to hold a sort of bidding war for the service, which will bog down the process when dozens or even hundreds of students are bidding on the same thing. This does at least address pricing a bit as services could be left without fixed prices and let all students pay whatever amount of illinibucks they desire and use the bidding war to decide what each student pays.

Comments

  1. Professor ArvanOctober 4, 2019 at 8:49 AM

    Let me address your last paragraph first and then go to some of your items. Suppose that without the Illinibucks 10 students would want to use the resource at the same time, but with the Illinibucks and the pricing system imposed, that got it down to only 2 students, who wanted to use the resource. Would that be an improvement in efficiency or not? Please think that through.

    Among the scarce items you mention, reserving a private room in the Library is one that has come up fairly frequently in the past. I take it the demand for such space is to work on a group project. It would be good to know if open space that allows talking but is not private would be a reasonable substitute or not. When I'm in the BIF commons area, it does seem that students are often doing group work there. And the space is pretty heavily utilized, which makes me think we need more such space on campus.

    On your other examples, renting a fan for a dorm room was entirely new to me. I gather this is for one of the older dorms. Are there such dorms that don't have air conditioning? I know that ISR is undergoing renovation now. Maybe the longer term solution is that any such older structure needs to have it HVAC systems redone.

    I didn't understand the tutoring center idea, so I could use some clarification on that. How does the system work now. Will the tutor be interacting with groups of students at the same time even if those students didn't come as a group? If that's true, I'd find it quite surprising. But perhaps you also meant that the tutoring would be in a room where the door could be closed so there was some privacy. I wasn't sure which it was, so I hope you can expand on that.

    With each of your examples, the question to follow up with is whether overall capacity is set efficiently now or if it can and should be expanded. You should try to work that through on a case by case basis.

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    Replies
    1. Tjalling koopmansOctober 4, 2019 at 12:20 PM

      To explain the dorm room example, older dorms do not in fact have AC. In reference to the tutoring center, the general idea is that you walk in and wait to get help. However, this take up to an hour, you will only get one piece of advice for one problem and then the tutor will go to someone else. Being able to have a tutor actually work with you or at the very least have you be a priority, I.e. they come to you every other time they help someone, is what I meant.

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