Econ 490 Fall Joan Robinson

Before writing on this week’s prompt, I want to make an update or a future update to a previous post. At the beginning of the semester I wrote about my internship at a medical practice where the supervisor was a poor leader and the dysfunctional working environment that came with it. I have decided to go back to the office over winter break and I’m curious to see if improvements were made by the office manager or if they are continuing to be ignored. I know the semester will be over by the time I am able to make these observations, but I think it will be interesting to find out if the organization evolved or continued at their previous status. I want to observe the new group dynamics because I have been told they hired a few new people and a few have left. An interesting detail is that one of the new hires is the daughter of the supervisor. I’m sure this will come with new conflicts at the office.  -----------------------------------------------------------------------------...

Reflecting on last week’s post on gift exchange and team productivity, I wanted to go back to some ideas I did not originally address in my post. An interesting factor that was present in all three articles that I did not consider was the fact that they all used young children. As discussed in class, different reasons for this could be to generate unbiased results, but more accurately to generate no socialized results. Children learn behaviors through socialization from their parents, teachers, and friends. At young ages, they are taught to share and obey authority. To avoid tainted outcomes, the situations used young children in the hopes of getting a raw and honest outcome of how children would react. In addition, if the children were older factors like the number of siblings they have, their understanding of opportunism, the value of the reward, and their preferences would drastically impact the design of the experiment. Overall, the take away from all three articles was the id...