Peter Diamond

As we come to the end of the semester, there comes a time to reflect on all of the lessons we've learned from the class. This is sometimes referred to as "ICES forms time", but there are also ways to reflect on a class that actually matter. Hopefully, this blog post and all others like it are helpful in ways that the ICES forms are not. Lessons Learned What have we learned in Econ of Orgs? Well, I'll certainly never forget that finger guns refer to the holdup problem. But outside of that, I've learned a ton about management structures. As someone who would like to go into Project Management upon graduation, this is certainly something that interests me. The various types of managers, monitoring, and rising to your level of incompetence are all things that I feel will stick with me well into my professional career. Class Structure The class structure was perhaps a bit too optimistic. While it makes perfect sense to have every class open to student di...

In the summer of 2016, I worked for a sales company (previous documented in  Sale Team Six ). As part of the company, I was part of a variety of campaigns, including one for cable and phone provider AT&T, or more specifically their DirecTV service. The majority of this job consisted of going door to do and trying to convince people to sign up for a cable plan, and as soon as they'd either reject me or sign up, I'd leave and move on to the next customer. It was grueling work, but it was simple and didn't require much keeping up with people. Well, one day I'm reviewing my leads for the upcoming week, and I notice a familiar name. It's one of my cousins, but one of the ones I never see. I'll refer to him as Bill. I mention this to my supervisor (we'll call him Ted), and he remarks that family members are ripe for sales, as they usually inherently trust you, which gives you the leg up compared to random strangers. I, however, have some kind of a soul stil...

The critically acclaimed period drama Mad Men  centers around an ad agency and its employees adapting to a world transitioning through the 1960s. In season 5, episode 4 (entitled 'Signal 30'), two employees, Lane Pryce and Pete Campbell, have a series of miscommunication and disagreements that result in a fist fight in the middle of the office. The events are as follows. Lane Pryce is the financial chief and a founding partner of Sterling Cooper Draper Pryce. Originally from England, he has always found it difficult to woo clients the way that the American executives in the accounts department can. Suddenly finding himself with newfound confidence, he enlists expert account man and fellow partner Roger Sterling to train him on how to talk to a client. After Roger gives Lane a lengthy lesson on how to talk to potential costumers, Lane sets off to get dinner with a representative from Jaguar Cars. Lane's dinner goes incredibly poorly. After attempting to use many of th...

In order to understand how team production works with the gift exchange, lets look at examples of gift exchange with varying levels of teamwork involved. As a general trend, an increase in teamwork and coordination usually increases the quality of the gift exchange. Little to no teamwork Birthday presents: Birthday presents are perhaps the most simple and ubiquitous form of gift exchange. It's someone's birthday, so you give them something as a gift. There is often very little coordination involved, as people like when the gift is a surprise. This can result in shoddy gifts from uninformed gift-givers, but if you're lucky both parties are in sync and a great gift is given. This is more or less a complete crapshoot, and really just depends on how well you know the person. Secret Santa: Much like with birthday presents, Secret Santa involved very little coordination. In fact, part of the rule is that no one knows who has been picked to give a gift to whom, henc...

Before we get into how the various choices within a college education affect income risk, there's a big decision that occurs right before that has a huge affect on income risk: the decision to go to college in the first place. Regardless of career path or major or anything, college is EXPENSIVE. By investing money into a college education (or, more likely, taking out student loans to pay for it), you are betting that the salaries open to you as a college graduate are larger enough than what you'd get with a high school education that it outweighs your student debt and the opportunity cost of all the time you're spending at a university instead of working. Now, obviously, everyone taking this class has made the exact same choice for this, but it's definitely important to consider how going to college affects your income risk. If income risk was the primary motivator for everyone in this class, then we can assume, at least for this group of people, that getting a degree r...

In looking back at my four "real" blog posts (discounting the post about my economists and the test post, of course), I haven't really noticed a lot in terms of themes. I like to tell stories, and I definitely like to infuse humor into those stories, but I've really tries to be varied in terms of the experiences and the settings of the blog posts. Outside of primarily involving organizations, there aren't a lot of recurring connections. In terms of class material, however, I've noticed that the topic of management appears in most of them, and not just the one where the prompt specifically asks about it. In Transaction Costs and Organization in the World of Music , I discussed an RSO's free-form management style. Despite having an official president, virtually every single decision was done as a group of equals which had its own pros and cons. In Opportunism in the Workplace , I lamented my former boss's invisibility. In Sale Team Six , the week where...

Illinibucks ™ : the chaotic new currency that UIUC introduced in the year 2017 for the purpose of relieving allocation issues with on-campus services. Immediately, the questions everyone asked were be "what services are these used for?" and "how should I, Peter Diamond, use my Illinibucks™?" and of course "what would this actually affect?" What are they used for? The short answer is: anything that involves priority or queues. The long answer is: look at this list. Registration : Tired of waiting to get your time ticket and register after all the courses you want have already filled up? You can spend Illinibucks™ to shoot right to the front of the line! Don't miss out on all those great classes just because you're a Freshman! Advising : Advising appointments are always (in my experience) on a first-come-first-serve basis. With Illinibucks™ you can bypass this and get advising as soon as you want. This also reduces the amount of time you nee...

During the June between my Sophomore and Junior years here at the University of Illinois, I was hired for a "market research" job. I was told I'd be part of an elite team of young go-getters who set their own goals, excel in person-to-person marketing, are highly self-motivated, and are extremely susceptible to business jargon brainwashing like that. Naturally, as an ignorant student hungry for anything that said "paid internship", I accepted. Now, just to be clear, this was a commission-only door-to-door sales job with a multi-level marketing structure to it. You'd start out on the lowest rung (Future Leader), be assigned to a team led by someone in the second-lowest rung (Leader), and once you proved yourself to be a completely mindless drone who believed 100% in the system (and made a lot of money for the fourth-level employees), you'd be promoted to Leader, where you work for a third level employee (Assistant Manager) and your goal is just to hire ...

In my high school days, I worked at a Dairy Queen near my home. The owner was very peculiar, and almost always scheduled the same two people together, forming four groups of two. For the purpose of anonymity, I'll refer to my partner as Jake. The owner spent a lot of time out of the store, and would compensate for his complete lack of monitoring and assistance by implementing extremely thorough random inspections. If anything was even slightly amiss at the store, we'd receive a very stern talking to and a threat to keep our pay. I now know that that's illegal, but at the time Jake and I took that threat very seriously. The point is that we had to be extremely careful when it came to maintaining the store. With only two workers in the store a majority of the time, one person would handle the in-store customers and the register, and a less lucky person would handle the drive-thru. During one particularly slow summer midday shift, I take off the headset and tell Jake that ...

During my Freshman year and most of my Sophomore year, I was part of a music RSO which will henceforth be referred to under the pseudonym 'Rockappella'. For some background, this group was composed of a tight-nit group of arts students eager to entertain both strangers and each other. It had a very simple structure, with merely a president (who was referred to as "Benevolent Leader", as per Rockappella tradition) and a treasurer (nicknamed "Dollars" - also tradition), the only two positions an RSO is required to have. The group was very self-contained, and all decisions made regarding Rockappella's policies were put to a simple majority vote and everyone liked it that way, as we all feared that any actual power structure would lead to chaos. We did, however, coordinate with the network of the dozens of other choirs, bands, and a cappella groups on campus, so as not to set conflicting performance dates or reserve the same space. Without going into too muc...

Peter Diamond was born on April 29th, 1940 in New York City. He is a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and is known for his work in the fields of labor economics and social security, and more recently for being a Nobel Laureate. Also, as a fun fact, he once served as a professor to recent Fed chairman Ben Bernake. Over the course of his career, Diamond served on various economics and econ-adjacent boards and committees, including the Econometric Society, The American Academy of Arts and Sciences, The National Academy of Sciences, the National Academy of Social Insurance, and the American Economic Association. In 2010, Peter Diamond was awarded the Nobel Prize for Economics (alongside Dale Mortensen and Christopher Pissarides). Their theory regarded how government policy can effect various market inefficiencies, specifically in the housing market. This was especially important as the effects of the 2008 subprime mortgage crisis were still being felt in America....

This post is a test.