Post 6: Reflection

One theme I have noticed across multiple posts from my blog is the theme of efficiency as an economic goal. Efficiency in terms of logistics in a team structure is mentioned in both of the posts where I talk about teams. When I use the concept of efficiency in those types of contexts, I am thinking of how much time and effort it takes across an entire team to accomplish a given goal. In my second blog post, I talked about how leadership in organizations was structured and restructured in pursuit of efficiency in managing the organization at its current stage of growth or decline. In my fourth blog post, I talked about efficiency in terms of how my organization's leadership structure affected it. In my fifth post, I touched on the concept of market efficiency and how Illinibucks and a "bidding up" system for determining who goes to the very front of a line maximizes the efficiency of the market for spots in line. Efficiency is maximized through having those who want to move further up in line the most (and are therefore willing to pay the most) move up the furthest. The two different senses of the word "efficiency" that appear in my posts contrast on the surface, but a closer exploration will show that both uses of efficiency pertain to how well a system is being used to accomplish one or more people's most desired goals. The frequency with which this concept appears in my posts shows to me how important it is to economics as a whole.

There is one additional way to tie my posts to themes in our class that I did not notice before. Pertaining to the blog post on team structure, I realize now that my service fraternity's lack of need for a formal system of accountability ties into our class's concept of repeated coordination games. Many people in my division of the fraternity are friends both in and outside of meetings, and it is common for groups of people to spend multiple semesters working in similar positions where they have to coordinate their activities. All directors and committee members in a semester will have to interact and cooperate with each other to some extent to plan activities, so someone that was a poor teammate during a previous semester would often have to work with the same people later.  Working together during a semester can be considered the equivalent of a coordination game with two options for each player: be a good teammate that is willing to compromise and does their fair share of the work (cooperate) or be a poor teammate that slacks off or refuses to compromise on important topics or even betrays their teammates' trust in some way (cheat.) There is a fairly high chance that the game will be repeated, either in the same form of cooperating as team mates or in a different but equivalent form of the future of a social relationship. Social relationships can be thought of as a cooperation game with two options: keep the relationship strong, which, like a "cooperate" option, will lead to a Pareto optimum of a good friendship if both players choose it, or let the relationship end, which, like a "cheat" option, will lead to a non-optimal equilibrium of the end of a friendship. The close-knit quality of the fraternity's brothers means that there is a high likelihood of cooperation games being repeated in one form or another, which means that the value of the theta variable in this case is relatively large. This acts as an informal system of accountability encouraging cooperation, as potentially uncooperative brothers know that choosing a cheat option will likely lead to their teammates choosing a cheat option themselves in the future, resulting in both players experiencing less than optimal outcomes.

My process for writing these posts has evolved in a way that I hope is noticeable. I try to focus less on quantity (the number of situations and ideas touched on) and more on quality (explaining those situations and ideas in economic terms in depth.) This is because, based on Prof. Arvan's comments, I realize that focusing on quality results in an overall higher quality post than focusing on quantity. I am changing my focus by listing out on paper the different topics that come into my mind after reading a prompt, and then just picking a few of those and exploring them to the best of my ability. I write my post based on what I think of at that point, and if an appropriate length has been reached, I conclude the post. If not, I pick another idea to explore.

In future prompts, I would like to see more opportunities to evaluate hypothetical situations like the "Illinibucks" prompt. Such prompts give us the power to create our own small economic world in our head with mechanics and dynamics we can play with for our edification. I find that the freedom that comes with evaluating a hypothetical situation allows for deeper exploration of economic ideas than exploring the economics of a real-life situation. I feel that this may be because a hypothetical situation can be shaped into a perfect exploration ground for an idea we are exploring, which is unlike a real life situation where exploration will be bounded by what did and did not actually happen. While being able to relate economic ideas to practical and applicable situations is important, I feel like the deeper exploration that comes from hypothetical situations will make this a more interesting class.