My opportunity to thank Prof Arvan

I would like to thank Professor Arvan for his excellent classroom examples and all of the blog feedback. While I has disliked writing blog posts in the past I feel I have learned a lot more doing these blog posts.

I really learned a lot mater wise especially transfer pricing which was asked to me by a company in an interview. This just shows me that all of the topics in class are applicable topics to the real world. In addition, the whole principal agent model makes a lot of sense in terms of how companies choose applicants and visa versa. I am trying to pursue Actuarial science which uses risk management, a topic that we discussed in class. This just shows me the benefits that this class has given me in terms of knowledge about these various topics.

In terms of the excel HW I felt it was easy enjoy to understand in math terms, which helped to really point out what the message of the assignment was. In addition, I enjoyed the graphs, which helped to easily explain the section of the assignment.

Overall, I enjoyed the blogs because they gave me an outlet of my thoughts on these various discussion topics and try to learn from my classmates. In addition, I was able to comment on others topics, which I thought gave my opinions about their thinking. The last the blogs did were to get me thinking about real world applications to the topics only adding to the great opportunities I learned from taking this class.

Thanks again Professor for a great semester and I think that throughout some of my interviews there will be questions concerning some of the topics that I learned about throughout this class.

Brand vs Reputation Whats the Difference?

The company that I would like to discuss is Google. This company has one of the strongest brand names due to the magnitude of products that they are beginning to put into the marketplace and obviously the famed search engine “Google”, which I would say is one of the most used “product” in the US.

In addition, Google has always branded itself as the company that will push technology into the future, in terms of the new phones that they are producing and also their initiative in the electronic car marketplace. These are only a few of the numerous things that Google is doing and I feel that they are beginning to expand more and more into other sectors than just the web.

This is also the case in the people they hire because their brand pushes for the best of the best because they have branded themselves as the company of the Future, and in my opinion “more techy” than even Apple. This all helps Google to become one of the major players in the technology industry and helps expand their reputation all over the world because of the respect that their competitors hold about Google.

I feel that this brand and reputation tie together very well because they have tried to build the brand of being the Company of the Future and the reputation that they have is based on this idea of being the “Future”. I think that what a company Brands itself should be based on the reputation that others have about it because if Google said it was the company of the Future but customers/investors didn’t think so then that Brand should be changed because obviously people don’t hold the same view as the company. These two aspects are so correlated because the brand is what the company thinks of itself based on how the reputation of their company is view by outsiders. So this whole idea that Google brands itself as the company of the Future tells me that they want to hire employees who will help build this brand and they want their customers reputation of themselves to be seen as the brightest and best technology company out there.

So overall I would definitely say that Google has made a name for itself as being the company of the Future and have used this brand to build products to build that reputation. Without the reputation a company cant brand itself to be something completely different than how they are viewed.

Reputation at work

As with most people who did sports everyone had a role on their team. Well mine was always to be the fun, goofy kid because I always enjoy jokes. This sounds pretty juvenile but I feel that every group needs different people who has different roles, such as: the super intense kids who are only about performance and “Live, Breath, and Love” the sport, then there are usually the kids in the middle who like to have some fun during practice because it helps to make everything more enjoyable (slightly). I was always a pretty goofy kid, who would try and make others laugh because at least to me being a teammate is someone who tries to make others more comfortable and what better way than some savvy one-liners during that 6-8am practice.

However, as I grew older I realized that I needed to start to relax with the jokes because is sometimes distracted me from the overall goal which was to go as fast as possible and not be able to talk after sets. This change was pretty apparent from 8^th grade to High school because of how much harder the competition became and now we were fighting for spots on the Varsity team and potentially college recruitment. While this change was difficult for me at first, I learned that after practice is a more suitable place for jokes and it helps to unwind after a morning swim practice. In addition, this allowed me to be much more productive in practice and helped me to be one of the top freshmen swimmers on a team that was a many time state champion.

While this change was difficult at first I really felt it was beneficial to my development as a swimmer and as more serious athlete/individual. Overall this change really helped me to see that if one gets their work done then why wouldn’t a person try and have fun with my teammates, and that only makes me enjoy waking up for those dreadful AM practices.

the triangle of death

For my summer internship I have dealt with a situation where I was in a triangle relationship between the principal agent problems. This was during the beginning part of the internship where I was required to talk to individuals about their experiences with financial planning and also try to get them to use our company for financial advising.

This situation was very difficult because it required me to not only be very engaged with the customers but also my boss because if I didn’t make any calls or contact any individuals I wouldn’t be doing a very good job for my boss. This is the same for my other agent relationship, which was my customers and I. This relationship required me to be very specific when discussing options that one could take for financial planning and also asking them what they would like to do.

This circumstance really proves to me that this was a triangle relationship because if there wasn’t adequate communication between me and my boss and me and the customers the relationship would’ve broken down and the efficiency of communication would dramatically decrease. This left me in a lot of difficult calls because sometimes a customer wouldn’t answer for a few days, which would require me to have my boss wait till I made contact with that individual. In addition, if there were difficulties with communication then I would need to deal with both parties having different thinking about how to advise what the customers decide.

However, since both parties were so involved there weren’t any situations where only one principal got their way because I worked in a service company so there wasn’t a lot of only one way transactions because especially in financial advising its hard to have the company have all say over what the customer should do any how their money should be divided up into many stocks, etc.

Obviously there can be some tension between the two principals because they are dealing with managing money, which can be a very difficult situation because obviously there are many different methods of managing money and also a lot of opportunity for fighting/arguments. I haven’t dealt with many fights but I have had some pretty extreme phone calls with people; allowing me to really see the triangle relationships between me being the agent and the two principals being the customers and the company. I also can see that there will probably be conflicts in the future and it just means that I will need to be able to make sure that the communication is effective.

The paralles of Group projects

Similarly to most individuals there’s a negative response that is associated with group projects. In on sense a group project can be a positive experience with a great deal of collaboration between group members, however this seems to be very different than in most of my real life experiences involving group projects.

The first example of a group project I had was from my Econ 203 group project, which was a group of 4 or 5 working on a specific assignment. This whole issue of group size should also be mentioned because most times when I am in a group with more than 4 people, there always seems to be someone who isn’t willing/able to work on the project at times when others are free. This whole circumstance is very annoying because even if there are multiple dates/times when some members decide to get together there’s always an outlier who is busy.

In this example it was 2 individuals that had very busy schedules because both were athletes and who had to focus on practice and other activities involved in their sport. This caused a problem because they were always busy right after their classes and didn’t have any time to discuss/work on the project with us group-mates. This resulted in a disorganized system, which basically meant that 3 of the people would be working together and the other 2 had to talk to us either over email or Facebook. Both of these options where very annoying because one of the two people wouldn’t respond to an email or Facebook message; making communication between group members very difficult, thus becoming very problematic to agree on who would do what parts of the problem and ultimately ended up hindering our groups overall success. As in R&B chapter 8, there wasn’t any group synergy because all members of the group weren’t on the same level of understanding as the others who met in person.

This whole issue of group synergy is very important to overall success because if one individual isn’t communicating with the other group members there seems to be a lapse in the group dynamic. In addition, there’s a lack of communication which causes the group dynamic to be split up and focused more on a few people, who are communicating while the others have no understanding of the project and what still needs to be done.

In this case it is very annoying to do group work because I feel that there will always be a lapse in the group synergy due to some individuals being left out of necessary meetings and come out with a lack of information.

Another group project where a similar problem arose was in High School when I had to do a group presentation where the teacher gave us a scenario and in a group of 5 we had to give a lengthy presentation about what we would do in this situation and how would we go about accomplishing this.

Once again, this ended up being a struggle because different people were busy at different times and sometimes weren’t willing to compromise on the meeting time, thus causing conflict among some group members. In addition, this made it very difficult for everyone to agree on one strategy that we would use and arguments about different ideas occurred, which cause the group synergy to be split up into some who agreed on one strategy and others who agreed on another strategy.

This whole situation was very annoying because I feel that communication was split up among these cliques. Once again, I feel that in this large of a group there will always be individuals who disagree on some facet of the project and cause a lot of inefficiencies, thus hindering the overall success of the project because concessions are needed in order for everyone to agree on one strategy.

These two examples really prove to me that in order for a group to be successful the level of communication between group members should be very high. In addition, the size of the groups should be examined to determine if a single opinion is to be made, such as in my experience with disagreements between individuals. Overall I feel a churn in my stomach when a teacher mentions a group project because while some of the projects are successful, there are also others that are unsuccessful due to ineffective leadership and lack of collusion between group members.

The struggles of perfect distribution

I agree with what the article is saying because I feel that obviously the income isn’t proportionally distributed to individuals even though in the perfect would this would be one of the many goals of society to really make people equal. In addition, the article talks about the marble distribution, which seems a little elementary, however this distribution is very skewed to one side aka the rich people. The whole topic of people with more opportunities beating out the less fortunate is also very significant because I do agree that and it is obviously noticeable especially in the college application process and job market search. 

I have experienced both the benefits and problems associated with group activities because for some situations I feel it’s very hard to equate someone’s performance with another person’s performance.

My experience with the benefits of group activities is on my Econ 203 group project, which ended up in a very equal distribution of tasks and thus made it easier to see who was motivated and did their best work and who didn’t. While everyone got the same grade there’s always an option to talk to the professor if one of my group mates did minimal work. The reason it was a benefit is due to the equal responsibility of each group member and that each member took care of business; enabling a much more productive product. In addition, I feel that this push for equal responsibility is a very good thing because how can an individual be assessed on their part if they didn’t fully contribute to the whole team’s goals. The last reason that this situation worked out was because every group member was asked to give a performance review of each other; holding each individual responsible for their effort, however the group grade as a whole reflects group motivation more than individual motivation.

While I wish that every group activity would have a positive experience sometimes a negative/self-centered approach happens. A time in my life where I have experienced this self-centered approach is when I was doing my on an important science project during my sophomore year of High School. This turned out to have a bad outcome because some of the group mates didn’t actively communicate how much of their part of the project they needed help with. This lack of communication caused a very negative outcome because people were only self-motivated and cared only about their portion of the project or having other individuals finish their part for them. This was very irritating because for someone who tried their best on the project their performance was brought down by the lackluster performance of another individual. In addition, while it was easy to see who hadn’t done their part of the assignment the teacher still gave us the same grade because it was a group project not an individual project, which really aggravated the other 3 individuals who worked hard were punished for another person’s lack of motivation.

While this whole issue of distributing is easy to figure out the hard part is coming up with the appropriate distribution for an individual depending on their effort/motivation. In addition, the article also got me really thinking about morals. This is because I feel like the whole distribution curve is very skewed, which means some individuals are cut out of the benefits while other benefit from outside variables such as: money, and connections. 

So this topic of morals should also be intertwined with income distribution, as seen in the real world, some individuals make questionable or unethical decisions when it comes to opportunities aka opportunism. 

The cost and benefits of "Illinibucks"

I believe the whole Illinibucks could be used for things like cutting in line for basketball/football tickets because that is a market where the people who don’t want to wait in the lines could pay a certain amount of Illinibucks to cut the line. I think that this system could cause problems due to potential age differences an thus the topic of “Senority” comes in, however if people paid certain amounts I think that even if an individual was a Freshmen they should have opportunity to buy the same illinibucks as upperclassmen. So basically if a student is willing to pay for the Illinibucks, then they should be able to have the same opportunities as anyone owning Illinibucks.

The first thing that I would be wiling to spend money on is a “perfect” class schedule. The reason for this is that it would enable more students to get their preferred schedule, which would help keep their happiness “high”. In addition to this I believe that I would also use Illinibucks for things such as books, sports tickets and discounts on food or other goods that’s students regularly use. However, this system would be difficult to figure out which goods the Illinibucks would be used for. Also I could really imagine other uses for these Illinibucks other than these options because these are, at least to me, the most important things that Illinibucks could be used for.

The prices for these Illinibucks could spark a number of prices because picking one set price would cause differences in the amount of money brought in by the school, which is obviously not going to happen because we all know the school isn’t trying to lose money on this endeavor. In addition, if the prices were too low then too many people would buy these Illinibucks, which would make people not really benefit because there is still risks of not enough space in certain classes, which would defeat the purpose of the Illinibucks. On the other hand, a price set too high would mean that only a very small number of people would benefit from this and only because they are more fortunate or have more personal wealth than other students. This obviously would spark lots of controversy because the “lower” class students would be removed from benefitting and would be angry when they didn’t get equal opportunity as other students. Overall this Illinibucks scheme would be extremely hard to implement because a lot of people such as upperclassmen with high GPA’s would be angry when a spot in a class was taken by someone who paid money to get priority over other students.