team production

A very relevant example for gift exchange and team production for college students is having to do group work in your courses. I would say at least 1/3 of all courses in college will require group work in some format- whether it be working in groups in a discussion section or having to do a group project. I would also say for the most part that students generally do not like to do group work even though they will tolerate the assignment. There are a few different styles of group work and I believe some of them are more effective than others.

Group work in college is related to Johnathan Haidts article about marble sharing. Haidt states that that the "share the spoils" button in humans brains is not pressed by the mere existence of inequality,  but when 2 or more people collaborated to produce a gain. In the scenarios where the children would either find the marbles in the cups or be pulling on different ropes to get the marbles out of the machine- they would not end up sharing their wealth between them as they viewed it as 'finders keepers'. Michael Tomasello, a psychologist who created this experiment, believes that the 'share the spoils' response  emerged at some point in the last half-million years as humans began to hunt cooperatively. The main key is that if the humans could develop stable, ongoing partnerships they would be able to accomplish much more as a team than if they were alone. So essentially these early humans were responding to the incentive that if they were willing to do work for someone else (and other persons reciprocate) that they will all be better off for it. This can be applied to group work in college if you can put an expectation/ incentivize them to have to work together or else it will negatively impact their own personal grade.

I think this is best accomplished by having two separate grading scales when it comes to group work: an individual grade and a group grade that both go in to calculating the final assignment grade. Group work that only assess participation points or just has a singular completion grade and doesn't assess who did what are much less effective, especially if the professor assigns the groups themselves. Half of the group members are probably incentivized by not wanting to have their grade suffer at the expense of two lazy students and are willing just to do the whole assignment. The two lazy members in this scenario are more than willing to allow these other two students to do the whole assignment in discussion section especially since the hard working students are stuck with the lazy ones because the teacher randomly assigned them. Since there is only one grade that applies to all members regardless of who contributed what, it is more likely than people will be doing uneven amounts of work to receive the same grade.

To remedy this, or to achieve a 'share the spoils' scenario and incentivize members to share wealth (work) evenly, like I stated earlier making two separate grading scales is a good move in my experience. An example of this that I have personally experienced was when I was in a political science course and my group and I had to present on Obamacare. The professor split us into groups but said we are welcome to divvy up responsibility for each part of the project between ourselves as we saw fit. Also he said that 60% of the assignment grade was determined by your own contribution and how well you individually presented and 40% of it was determined by the groups overall presentation. This made it so that if you were with even two sub par group members, that your overall grade could still be high if you did your part well. However, this system incentivized all members to actually want to contribute as the expectation of your grade riding on other peoples work and vice versa makes it so everyone wants to do well by everyone else. We split the project up into 4 parts: background of the bill (what it is trying to do), conservative stance, liberal stance, and actual implementation/ cost it will have. Luckily I was in a rational group and they all worked very hard on their individual parts as did I, and we all just dropped our own individual contributions into a google powerpoint doc without ever meeting up. We all just practiced our parts and expected the other members to show up having done the same since a good proportion of our grades was in eachothers hands. We all received very good grades on the project because we were incentivized to want to share the work as equally as possible and that everyone tried very hard on their part because there was an expectation that others would do the same for your benefit just as much as theirs. 

future income risk

I would say a good amount of choices I have made have been made with an eye looking towards the future and reducing income risk. For starters, and this will apply to everyone's posts, we all are enrolled at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign which is ranked #44 by USnews for best national colleges. Being from the suburbs of Chicago and therefore the state of Illinois, eventually coming to UIUC was a no-brainer. Weighing the average cost for a 4-year university which is $24,061 (according to http://www.collegedata.com/cs/content/content_payarticle_tmpl.jhtml?articleId=10064) versus the average cost to attend UIUC which is $15,698 (http://colleges.usnews.rankingsandreviews.com/best-colleges/rankings/national-universities) that is a difference of $8363 saved by attending here over the average cost of 4-year public universities. Much less considering being able to drive myself and all my belongings only 2 hours to reach the campus is saving myself/ parents a large variable cost amount compared to if I went to school in California and had to pay for flights home/ move all my stuff out there and back/ store my things over summer etc. So attending the best public university in the state to get the lower tuition costs and the benefits of being a top-50 overall university (including private schools) is definitely a double win in my eyes. I have taken out student loans every semester and I would prefer not to say the exact amounts but we will put it at $80,000 (or $10,000 x 8 semesters) to have some easy math.

Here at UIUC I am an economics major. Although in my opinion my major is not as marketable to employers for the types of jobs I am trying to apply to, an economics background is right behind finance, marketing, and management majors that are in the business school here. In this sense I would say I have put myself in a decent position from my major choice to be marketable to employers; mostly based off the fact that I am graduating from such an accredited university. What will luckily help me out to reduce future income risk is that I have had internships the two previous summers at the same company in two completely different roles. I worked in a customer-oriented role for a third party logistics company where I would have direct contact with many people working at Costco Wholesale Corporation. I would take care of scheduling, issue resolution, accounting incidents, and just general operations of an enterprise customer account for my company. The second summer I worked in a sales-operations role where I (along with my mentor) would be responsible for 30-40 automatically booked trucks per day as well as transactional selling of freight to our same automatically booked carriers (trucking companies). We would have to track all the loads transit times, deal with trailer rejections (at the dock while loading or unloading), issue resolution usually related to breakdowns/flat tires (a lot of these), accounting incidents, and general operations of a sales account. These past experiences, as well as being employed for 2.5 years at a campus bar, have given me a very strong resume and many relevant skills/ experiences/ human capital development that I can talk to recruiters about while applying for jobs. The jobs I have worked the past three years (although I cannot give an exact $ amount) have most definitely reduced my future income risk vs. having no internship experience.

I am also a part of a social fraternity on campus (120+ members) and have served on the executive board multiple times. This is not as strong of a case as my previous job experience, but (in my opinion) one of the main hiring criteria for a lot of companies is a "culture fit". Culture and cool company culture (sponsored happy hours or monthly outings) are things I hear literally every company tout in interviews/ career fair/ on their websites etc. Being a part of a social fraternity and having relevant leadership positions within it have also helped me out a lot in recruiters eyes when it comes to "company culture". From a recruiting standpoint hiring the 15 people with the best GPAs (although a very important metric and indicative of good work ethic/ intelligence) is not how they approach their hiring practices. Recruiters obviously want as good of GPA/ coursework as possible but this metric is weighted against the culture fit. This is because the recruiters want to hire people they think will mesh with the office and just in a general sense someone who they think is a very normal, sociable person that they would be willing to see 40 hours per week every week for the foreseeable future. Being able to talk about a leadership role I had within a social organization combined with relevant job experience/ skills have made me a decent hiring candidate. I will say you could get the same effect from being a part of a business fraternity or an RSO that is related to your major/ type of job you are hoping to seek, but this is the choice I made.

So saving money versus the average cost of universities (staying in state), being at a top-50 university, having a solid resume from 2 separate internships, and being on the executive committee for a social organization are all factors/ choices I have made to reduce my future income risk. Also, hopefully when I am employed shortly after graduation, I plan on working in downtown Chicago and most likely living at my parents house for a few months to start saving money. This is absolutely to reduce my future consumption spending (living + utilities + food for the most part are free) and to save up some capital so when I decide to actually move downtown I will have money saved up. I will most likely move in with friends from UIUC who would be doing the exact same scenario I was (living at home) so my future place downtown will most likely not be in the gold coast or anywhere that is too expensive. I do not own a car nor do I plan on getting one anytime soon so I will be taking public transit, and I like to think of myself as a frugal person who does not eat out too much so I will also save money by cooking for myself. I definitely believe the choices I have made vs potential choices I did not make will reduce my future income risk to a good degree and that I will have a very content life with (hopefully) no big surprises.

connecting the dots

1) I will discount the first two posts I made because one was a test post and another was a short history/biography of my assigned economist Ben Bernanke. The following four posts: transaction costs, opportunism, teams, and Illinibucks are the remaining ones of note.

*also would like to write apologies for doing this late, I was at a wedding this weekend and got back last night*

It is obvious that all the posts (besides the first 2) are related to decision making and the dynamics of making decisions as an individual or in a group setting. My first post I wrote about the transaction costs I had to make while inside an organization (where in this case) I was employed at. The second post was about any opportunistic behavior I did/ did not take advantage of while in an organization. Both posts were related to my previous work experiences at my logistics internship. The second two posts about teams and Illinibucks can be slightly related because they are both looking at a more macro-level of how organizations work. My teams posts was about another previous job I had and the chain of management that was employed there. The Iliinibucks post was about an idea for Iliinibucks and how/ what type of organizations would be able/ willing to try an implement such a system.

2) Not exactly what I wrote about in my post but at one of my previous jobs the system of matching up interns with their mentors for the summer was very similar to the hospital matching examples from homework. Interns would go on mini-shadow opportunities in the first few days on the job and talk to many full time employees in different positions. The interns would then rate (not the person) but the job roles they shadowed in an order of preference. The recruiters would then go through and match up the interns and mentors into different roles/ geographical focuses- attempting their best to try and give everyone their top preference.

3) My process for writing these posts has not really evolved at all from the beginning. Besides from my first two posts which were very short in length, nothing has changed that much. I still read the prompt a few times and think about what I am going to write for a few minutes before I start writing into blogger. If I get stuck at any part or feel as if I am now elaborating my thoughts well enough I will frequently glance at other students posts to try and gauge how I should write the rest of mine.

4) I think the posts so far have been relevant to the course material. The only thing I can think of is initially make groups at the beginning of the semester and have very concrete guidelines on how the commenting on group members posts should go. This is to hopefully avoid confusion on expectations on the blogging at to make it easier to grade for yourself Prof. Arvan. As far as future post expectations I think the formula for the posts you have been using so far is working very well and the posts are relevant to course material. I will say however I believe if you had hard deadlines every Sunday night rather than Friday at 6pm more students would do it ontime. I realize this would mean my current post would still be late which I accept responsibility for. However I will say I, along with a good amount of other students in this course I assume, do a majority of schoolwork on Sundays. Also a good amount of students start enjoying campus nightlife starting on Thursday night- mkaing the Friday night due date a bit hard for some students to make. A hard Sunday night deadline could make it much easier and transparent for students to finish posts and to see which students are actually doing them.