Tjalling Koopmans Econ 490 fall 2019

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 ...

Throughout my time as a student, I have been involved with many group projects and have usually found success in them. Despite these results I hesitate to call the teams I have worked on successful, At least in the conventional sense. I will proceed to explain how teams I was part of succeed and what aspects they failed in, as well as the general structure of those teams that I was a part of. I will not mention any singular team as most if not all of the groups I have been a part of have followed these trends.  When it comes to organizational structure, my groups tended to follow a strange mix between the one boss and all network styles of management. I say this because there is a difference in between the one boss style of management and what my groups end up being which has remained consistent with whoever I work with. Ordinarily, “one boss” structure means that one individual is in charge of distributing tasks and information with their subordinates and communicate directly...

Seizing the moment is often easier said than done. This can be due to a number of restrictions. It can either be the result of not understanding that an opportunity has presented itself or that there are consequences for trying to take advantage of an opportunity and failing. The fear of failure is not something that should be underestimated. Another thing that should not be underestimated is how brief some opportunities can be. Finally there are just times where opportunities just do not seem worth the effort initially but not taking it ends up biting you in the butt later on. I have probably not been opportunistic for all of these reasons at least once, despite how minor they were. What follows are some examples of how I did not act in an opportunistic manner, why I did not do it and how it impacted my life. First are instances where I did not take an opportunity because I believe that the benefit outweighed the opportunity cost. One example of this would have been helping my da...

Over the summer I worked at a company with a rather unusual corporate structure. The company was called Aspiritech and did QA testing for a variety of companies, with Bose and Amazon being among them. While the company had certainly grown from its humble beginnings, it still only had around a hundred people employed. Perhaps it was this small amount of employees that led to its fluid and bare bones corporate structure. The minimal structure of the organization became apparent during my training as I discovered that the employees who were training me were themselves hired not too long ago. The nature of the company itself also meant that the guidelines for the QA were not determined by anyone at Aspiritech. Instead, testing procedures were written by the company that supplied the products and it was the job of the employees to run the tests as specified.  That being said, there was at least some interactions between the testers. Once a week, meetings would be held to go over the ...

Tjalling Koopmans was an Economist who won the noble peace prize for developing an economic rational theory called activity analysis. This theory involves the distribution of resources within an economic system to achieve an economic objective while minimizing the costs. This is very important as it contributed to the combing of mathematical equations and analysis to economic thinking. Furthermore, I do believe that his work is relevant to the economics being discussed in this class as the idea of cost minimization is prevalent in any workplace that seeks to maximize efficiency. Source:https://www.britannica.com/biography/Tjalling-Koopmans

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