Econ 490 Fall Joan Robinson

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...

I wanted to respond to the discussion on the last blog post on income risks in the future. The class discussion made me think about future income risks after college and my first job. Initially, I did not think about this and this speaks to my generation’s focus on “the first job”. We work hard in school to get quality internships that we hope will turn into a job after school. We have this fantasy that we will be in the same company for years and move up in the company. I never thought about have numerous jobs and switching companies. However, this is a very real possibility. In addition, because we will have many different jobs after school, it is important to have a variety of skills to offer to employers so that you can stay desirable. Having a variety of skills has impacted my decisions and I did mention this in my original post. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Moving on to this week’s ...