Looking back on Economics of Organization

Williamson-like critique:

            This course, economics of organization was the first ever discussion lead course I have taken in economics, and I quite liked it. I enjoyed taking the subjects learned in econ and applying them to the organization. I also really enjoyed expanding the discussion into topics in psychology such as opportunism, goodwill and social identity. I don’t think we have any courses on behavioral economics and this made the course very unique.

            I truly believe that in a discussion based course, attendance is imperative. At the beginning of the course we had bonus points for attending lecture, I liked that a lot. It was a nice reward for being in class. However, even though we got points for merely being present in class, I do not think that this was not incentive enough to make the students really engage in the discussion. Don’t get me wrong, in my opinion, being in class is the least a student can do. We pay a lot for tuition and even though a lot of students care mainly about their grades, you might as well try to learn from the class.

            So back to the question of whether attendance should be mandatory, I don’t think so. Students should be responsible enough to know that attending lecture is how you gain the most knowledge from the course. And while simply being in class might be enough for some courses, I think attending lectures is the minimum effort a student can put. The output from a discussion is heavily affected by the amount of participation and contribution from other students. With that in mind, I do think participation points should be included in the class grading. Whether they would be bonus points, or part of the grading distribution, I really think that would motivate students who put in low effort into working harder… Just like in the Arkerlof model we have high effort students and low effort students and the latter might need additional rewards to contribute to discussions.

            Now addressing a little of the class structure. I really liked the “horse-shoe mode”. It really bothers me when we are all facing forward and the professor asks a question and the class is completely silent… I think if we were facing each other maybe we would be more willing to participate and share ideas. It is easy to ignore and pretend that the question is not being addressed to you when one has a screen between them and the rest of the class.

           

            That is the reason why I think computers and cell phones should be strictly restricted during the discussion mode. I know that a lot of students use computers to take notes and they should be allowed to do so during the lecture parts of the class, but it does not really make sense to me to do so during discussion. Phones and laptops are distracting, and how are you expected to answer a question and contribute when you were not paying attention to the question asked in the first place. Maybe during discussion, one could take notes on a piece of paper if necessary, this is what I do at least.

            Now based on previous classes or even some experience from being part of  RSO’s is evident to me that people are more willing to talk and discuss topics when they know each other. This could be achieved by maybe having the students introduce themselves to the person sitting next to them and coming up with one potential answer or maybe having it be more casual and starting the discussion with a game. One that I like is when you get asked a question and you have to throw a ball to the person you want to pass the question to. Again, I know I am more extroverted than some students, so this might work well with me, but at the same time I think having input from different students, who might not be comfortable enough to just raise their hands and share their ideas would be very beneficial to the discussion.

            I really liked the experiments we did in class. They made us engage with new classmates and also tied in the idea of how asymmetric information works in real life versus just being given the information and finding the equilibrium. Maybe this is a kind of activity that could be reproduced with different topics that we learned, for example having 3 people solve the principle agent model.