I am a student in Professor Arvan's Econ 490 class at uiuc. I am writing under the alias name of a famous economist as it is class policy and protects my identity.
I think that a lot of the choices that I have had to make concerning college have revolved around minimizing income risk and mostly one other factor. This factor is what I want to do after I graduate. Since I was a junior in high school I have wanted to create a technique for human embryo genetic engineering. This basically allows for the rewriting of human genes before a person is born. This has limitless potential for lowering cancer rates, heritable diseases (Alzheimer's, huntingtins), disjunction diseases (trisomy 21, 19, 13 etc.) and hundreds of other diseases that are due merely to a change in a few base pairs of a 3 billion base pair genome. Because of this, I chose my majors as molecular and cell biology and economics, so that I could get both a basis for the science side and a small understanding of the business side. My other aim was to limit the costs of getting these degrees. While I had offers at 5 colleges, including two of the top ten ranked programs in molecular a...
The example that comes to my mind when I think of the Illini bucks concept is parking. Personally, I have had an enormous amount of trouble with parking here at uiuc and I know I'm not the only one. In the scenario that I am thinking of, Illini bucks can be used to allow the buyer to buy preferential parking spaces (closer to their classes/apartment, off the street, covered or in a garage, etc.) It is important to note that the Illini bucks don't actually buy the parking spot, they just allow the buyer the ability to buy the spot. One change that would have to be made from the scenario that Professor Arvan outlined in the prompt would be that there would have to be other options for using Illini bucks other than for parking spaces, and the system for using the Illini bucks for parking spaces would have to be mediated by bidding. Without these two assumptions, everyone would just use all of their Illini bucks to buy the same level of access and the currency would be useless. ...
This variation of the principle-agent model is actually a significant problem that I faced when working as a swim instructor a few summers ago. The two principles that I had at the time were my boss who coordinated the private lessons that we scheduled, the parents of the children that I was teaching. These private lessons were scheduled to be half an hour and the parent is instructed to pay before entering the pool. Each lesson is a flat rate with no discounts given for multiple lessons. It is also the same rate for multiple children to be in the same lesson. As the agent, I was expected to be there 15 minutes early to collect equipment, formulate a lesson plan and then mark out an area of the pool for the lesson to take place in. The pool had to be claimed, because these lessons often occurred during free swim hours at the pool. The conflict between the principles idea of high and low effort usually revolved around the amount of time that the lesson consumed. Even with the 15 minut...
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