Comparing team production to articles

I work in a student run event planning company that functions like an RSO. For anonymity I will call it company H. We are registered as an LLC because we specialize in doing parties at clubs and bars. Although we are a company, the employees are not paid, and all of the profits are further invested into buying equipment and holding bigger events. The process of H holding an event is team production with gift exchange because the employees collectively give up their time for a sense of accomplishment from holding an event. There are experiences during my time in H that relates to the examples in the article, and some that do not.

H has three teams: creative, marketing, and music. The marketing team requests fliers and posters from the creative team, marketing distributes the material, and the music department invites musicians or prepares DJ sets that fit the theme of the party. If one team does not meet a deadline, other teams can get delayed as well, and the party can fall apart. Since planning and preparation takes weeks, members in every department frequently face deadlines that coincide with exams or major assignments. Because H does not offer any form of payment to its employees, one would expect delays from people prioritizing schoolwork during busy periods. However, we generally do not face delays from missed deadlines. Some members tell me afterwards that they even went as far as to stay up late night finishing their work for H before an exam. This could be explained through the moral lens in the "power of altruism" article. If the employees were paid an hourly rate, or per project, they would probably pass on these projects during exam time. Without pay, they instead feel a moral obligation to meet their deadlines. If they do not, they could negatively affect the entire event, or other teams that are expecting to start their work on schedule. Busy students are potentially sacrificing their school performance to fulfill an obligation to others in the organization, without any expected profit.

A few weeks ago, the president of H asked all of us to do market research on potential sponsors for our events. I thought that this was strange, considering that we have a marketing team that specializes in this field. As all members of the three teams uploaded their results on the shared google doc, I noticed that much of the work was not detailed or relevant enough to actually be used at all. Considering that 2/3 of H specialize in the visual/musical aspect of the event, this was not surprising. I could only assume that he had been receiving complaints about some members not doing work, so he tried to create fairness by giving everyone work. This seems to be the "Tit for Tat" approach mentioned in the game theory article. In order to have everyone participate equally, he gave the same assignment to everyone. I found this to be a terrible approach for many reasons. One, the whole reason why we separate members into teams is because we have different field of expertise, and different roles to fulfill. To assign everyone something that the marketing team is supposed to do actually seems more unfair to non-marketing members. Furthermore, he did not give detailed directions for the assignment. This means that people would either put in the minimum amount of work required just to say they completed the assignment, or the non-marketing members would not know what the expectations were. It is difficult to define fairness in practice. Should people be forced to put in the same amount of time? What if people are putting in different levels of effort? What if everyone is trying his/her best, but do not have the same level of productivity?

Sharing marbles is slightly more difficult to apply in this example. Everyone in H is tugging the rope to create a successful party. But the profit all goes back to the company, so it is unclear if fairness or distribution should be applied in this case. However, we could discuss the power to make decisions on how to use the profits for the company. In this case, the team leaders and the president get together in a board meeting and come up with several ways to spend the money. Then, every member gets to vote for a specific plan in a general meeting. The reasoning is that everyone contributed time into making the event possible. This is analogous to tugging the rope analogy mentioned in the sharing marbles article.

Connecting the dots

(1) Are the themes from one post that tie into other posts? if so, what are those connections?
I explore two main themes in my blog post, decision making and incentive. My first post was about Milton Friedman. Though he is known for his work on macroeconomics, I discussed one of his earlier papers written on decision making. In my second blog post I explored what affects one's decision to take an opportunistic act. In my third post, I discussed my experience of being on an effective team, and that it was effective because each member had the skill and incentive to make good decisions in volatile situations. The conclusion of these posts is that incentive seems to be the key to why one chooses one decision over the other. Self-preservation had a huge role in motivating the members of my team in the army. Calculation of the expected outcome was a main factor discussed in Milton Friedman's paper.
 
(2) Aside from addressing the prompt are there ways to connect what you wrote about to course themes? Were there connections that are more obvious to you now than at the time you wrote the post? if so, can you elaborate on that?

In the Illinibucks post, I discussed its implementation aspect. However, along with the excel homework, I realized that it addressed the topic of economics within an organization. Furthermore, it relates to the topic of how one should make decisions within an organization on price.

(3) Has your process for writing these posts evolved? Please explain how that has come about.

Although this is a blog, personal experiences can quickly go off topic or become unrelated to economics. As such, I started providing a frame for my posts. For some posts, I define the terms that will be discussed. For others, I try to read the textbook or an academic paper to see what others have already said about the topic. I also incorporated some data for my post on successful organizations. These three elements seem to provide a foundation on which I could analyze my experiences from an economic perspective.
(4) Now put yourself in the position of writing the prompt (this one or other prompts for future posts). What would you like to see? Can you give some reasons for that.

I would like to explore information asymmetry in detail, although we did discuss some of this during lecture in the context of trading companies in the past. In the modern age when communication is instantaneous, information asymmetry still exists in organizations. So my questions would be the following: What does a lower ranking employee miss that managers do not? What do managers miss that lower ranking employees do not? What kind of inefficiencies does this cause? How should it be improved?

I first experienced information asymmetry during my military service. When I was a private, I could not understand why so much individual freedom had to be taken away from soldiers. As I became promoted to a sergeant and squadron leader, I began to understand why some rules had to be in place. What is best for the team is not always best for the individuals. At the same time, I began to forget the troubles I had faced as a private, and how much impact certain rules had on my experience.

Illinibucks

Transfer pricing is the setting of price for goods and services sold between legal entities in an enterprise. In the case of the hypothetical "Illinibucks," the university is setting prices for faster service to its students, and rationing out the currency to pay for "moving up the line". There are a few things that come to mind that Illinibucks could potentially pay for. As mentioned in the prompt, priority for class registration is huge. During the summer, I spent hours adjusting my fall schedule because courses were prioritized to students from certain majors. I sent out emails to professors, constantly refreshed the course catalog page, and registered for backup classes to get my schedule in order. If I could have just payed something to guarantee that I could have priority in registering, I would have saved a lot of time and energy. From my experience of being in RSO leadership positions, renting out equipment and rooms for meetings can be a challenge. Getting priority for renting spaces is really important for RSO's that want to retain structure and professionalism. Renting group study rooms at Grainger library can also be something that people would be willing to pay Illinibucks for, especially near the end of the semester when group projects are due. The issue with low pricing of Illinibucks could be that the demand for "getting ahead in line" for a service "A" could be higher than the equilibrium price. In that case, there would be another line to get ahead of for those that are spending the Illinibucks, which gets rid of the purpose of its existence. A high administered price for Illinibucks could get rid of this problem, but it might also lower the number of uses by too much. In that case, the infrastructure that the University has to put in place to administer this system might be too costly for the benefit that it gives the University. Another issue is that students who get a lot of financial support can buy Illinibucks and use it to get priorities on things like class registration. This would raise moral issues because students in the university would be better educational opportunities based on wealth, rather than merit.