My Econ Alias Blog Econ 490 (John Maynard Keynes)

Pre-Post For this week’s prompt, I feel the purpose if meant for us to relate an example that we have experienced with gift-giving and relate it to the three articles provided. The general consensus of the articles is that people are born with traits of fairness but those traits can be altered through economic incentives and can cause unfair situations to occur. In order to relate an example of gift-giving, I will define that situation that I have experienced then discuss how each prompt goes against the example provided. I hope to get a full understand of the example and why gift-giving can be effective in certain cases but also be counterproductive. I want to get more in-depth with the issues of gift-giving as they apply to incentivized models. Post When I was on my Co-Op at Ashland Chemicals, they had a plant safety incentive program to encourage workers to keep safety in mind at all times. Ever since they implemented the program in 2006 they have been ...

Pre-Post The prompt asks to focus on the current decisions that we make with an eye towards the future and whether they were made to reduce income risk or because they seemed like good choices at that time. I feel like this prompt was chosen for us to reflect on how we make decisions for the future and for us to see the many factors that are uncertain in the future. Because there are many uncertainties we must ask how we try to reduce our income risks now to account for the possible uncertainties. We must also be aware if the decisions we make now are more self-protection decisions or self-insurance decisions are given our current state. This means that if we are in debt we will probably make self-insurance decisions over self-protection decisions for the future since we are focusing on getting out of debt. But by focusing on getting out of debt we are still making more self-protection decisions for the future because we are getting out of debt for the future. ...

In my team structure post I talked about the experience I had while interning at Ashland and looked at the structure of the business and how it affected my experience. In the first post, I responded about how my experience as a Co-Op at Ashland was mostly negative and when reflecting on the structure of the group I have come to the conclusion that it was because of the structure of the group. The structure of the group I worked in had several different facets that seemed to allow the organization to be successful but also caused people in the organization to be stressed and frustrated during change or busy spurts during production. Relating this to the Illinibucks post I could see that the implementation of that program could illicit chaos at the beginning because of the changes that students would not be used to. That can be related to Ashland as chaos occurred during a change in production that was not expected. This unexpected change could cause workers to act unet...