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Showing posts from October, 2017

Discussion on Managing Income Risk and Impacts of Past Choices and Decisions

The topic of managing income risk, from the perspective of a college student, is interesting because students come from a variety of financial backgrounds and face potentially very different situations when it comes to their financial futures. Some students come to college fully funded by their parents, while other incur a tremendous amount of debt via student loans. Others, and I believe this is where the majority of students fall, are somewhere in between. I think it is important to consider which category (or in between categories) a student falls because it may have affected their choices and management of future uncertainty while in college. Students who have loan debt may have been trying to work as much as possible during school to start saving or even start paying off their student loans, while others may or may not have had a similar decision making process. Without getting too personal, I am one of the people who falls somewhere in the middle of the categories I previously ...

Connecting the Dots

Upon reviewing our four major blog posts up to this point and reflecting on the topics discussed in each, I think there has been one main theme underlying the posts: Opportunism. Our blog posts up to this point have asked us to draw on personal experiences in organizations, think about real world examples, and consider hypothetical situations. While not every post centered around opportunism, it is a topic that is a common feature of other topics. The ideas of transactions costs and the real world examples we have thought about all tie into the idea of opportunism. Logically, this makes sense because opportunism is often caused by scarcity, and scarcity is the underlying idea behind all of Economics. Aside from addressing the specific prompt for each post, I think that the topics generally allow me to think abstractly about the topics and try to connect my experiences with what we have discussed in class. My favorite post that I have written so far was the post in which I discussed o...

Discussion on Hypothetical "Illinibucks" System

The hypothetical idea of a campus-wide system of allocating “Illinibucks” to students is an interesting concept to ponder and yields a vast array of possibilities.   I think that the method or reason behind a specific allocation system is important to the success of the system as a whole. If the Illinibucks were incentivized as a reward (maybe based on grades or year in school), people may care more about having them and what they could be used for than if they were arbitrarily allocated to each student equally. The system would also need a way to hold incentive for each individual student no matter what their interests or needs are. If there wasn’t a good use for an individual, he may be motivated to sell his allocation of Illinibucks to another student who would choose to spend more of them. However, that may be an impossible task, as students are inevitably different from one another and have different priorities and potential uses of Illinibucks. Based on that fact, the Illini...