Alice Rivlin ECON 490 Fall 2019

No one knows exactly what their future paths would be looking like until they make the actual steps into the future. Thus, all our decisions and actions are inevitably uncertain, with potential risks. When it comes to choosing majors and industries to study and work, our choices are made, considering both now and the future. One may choose his or her major because of his or her interest in the field, the difficulty of the required courses, the availability of academic sources in the college, and the accessibility of help from professors and advisors (to here and now). At the same time, he or she has to consider if jobs in this field will provide a high enough salary, the possibility of getting a promotion, or the job market demand (with respect to the future). I don’t know where I will be working in the future, nor what specifically I will do. However, I know I should make my decisions now as wise as possible to the future so that I will have more options to choose from with sufficient...

After a few weeks of reading prompts, brainstorming, and writing blog posts, I now have a better understanding of organizational structures and managemental aspect of maintaining a company ordered. The topic of the first-week blog post was about the efficiency of management according to our past experiences as an intern. The concept of transaction cost was also introduced. Transaction cost is basically every cost in an economic (or in real life, even a non-economic) activity. With respect to an organization, the goal is to maximize the efficiency with as least transaction cost as possible. Transaction cost also appeared In the week of discussion on team structures. Different team structures are suitable for different organizations, and they aim at improving the efficiency of management among the groups. The discussion of last week about  Illinibucks also has something to do with transaction cost, with respect to U of I staff and students this time. Illinibucks are created to make ...

Illinibucks can be applied to a bunch of activities on campus. Since U of I has a large campus with tens of thousands of people in total, demand is always more than supply and waiting in lines is so common. At the beginning of each semester, the lines in the bookstore are always too long; since the Starbucks on Green street closed during this summer, the lines in the Starbucks in the bookstore and Union become way longer than usual; football games and concerts in State Farm Center are always crowded, and it’s difficult to buy tickets sometimes; register for classes is a big thing to every student, and to successfully register all the classes one would like to can be hard, or “impossible”. I would like to spend my Illinibucks on registering classes as dearly as possible, since the quantity supply of econ courses are relatively insufficient compared to the quantity demand (the number of econ students). When I registered for courses this semester in March or April, I failed to select my...