Reflection Post

Before writing this post, my previous blog posts (and the prompts) seemed to address different topics and seemed to not have any connections whatsoever. The blog posts have so far addressed several topics: Transaction costs, Opportunism, Organization and structure of teams (and the features of high functioning teams), and transfer pricing (the idea of implementing a system of “Illinibucks”). Reflecting on my blog posts, most of them do not have many concrete connections with each other, but looking back, there are some instances or themes when I observed a connection. For example, when we looked at transaction costs and team structure, in my post about transaction costs, I spoke about working in a team during an internship where I felt there were transaction costs, which related to the discussion about team structure in which I talked about how group projects for classes work in different ways to teams in companies made up of employees. Also, the post about opportunism and Illinibucks were also similar in the way that opportunism was a concept that could be applied to the hypothetical system of “Illinibucks”, since opportunism would cause students to act in immoral ways, such as by misusing their allocation of Illinibucks. If Illinibucks were created, it would also create a black market for Illinibucks where students would buy and sell their Illinibucks for real money.

Initially, I did not completely understand how the prompts related directly to the course, sometimes because I did not understand the concept, although most of the time it was simply because I did not see any relation. For example, when I wrote the blog post about Opportunism, I did not quite understand how it related to economics at all, and specifically this course. However, after writing the blog post about Illinibucks and transfer pricing, I began to understand how opportunism relates to transfer pricing and how it explains human behaviour. By relating the concept of opportunism to scenarios I have observed in my life, I understood how the concept relates to several other concepts not only in this course but in economics in general. For other blog posts, the connection between the prompt and the course themes were very obvious, such as the blog post about team structure in which I was able to directly link my experiences to the themes of this course.

Thinking back on how I would write the blog posts, I noticed a few things that have changed. Firstly, I have become more confident about what I am writing about since the first blog post. At first I would be unsure whether the experience I was planning to write about was a good choice and whether I would be able to explain my thought process clearly to help the reader understand how my experience relates to the prompt and the course as a whole. Secondly, I started to provide more context in my post so that the reader can better visualize my experience and my point of view. In terms of the actual process, after the third blog post, I realized that I was having difficulties relating the prompt to the content of the course. Therefore, I since have started to read the prompt beforehand so that I have time to think about it rather than reading the prompt and then immediately start writing my response. Also, I started to write my response in different parts since I remembered that when it comes to writing long responses, this technique helps me since this way I have more time to come up with different idea to relate to my post. This is something I also do with coding assignments: I start early and work on it in small bits and pieces and sometimes I suddenly have a huge breakthrough which helps me to understand how to solve the problem.

I think there are a few things I would change about the prompt which I feel would provide more benefits to not only me, but to other students, the class and to the discussion as a whole. The key aspect of the prompt I would change is that I would try to make the prompt more clear when it comes to relating it to the course themes. As I explained, I struggled with this at the start of the semester and had the prompts been directly related to the course themes/contents, I would have better understood the concepts and fewer students, including myself, would misunderstand the prompt. Although this does not relate directly to how I would write the prompts, I think it would also help students if they could see sample blog posts about the same/similar concept since this would help avoid people misunderstanding the concept and creating an incorrect connection between the concept and their personal experiences.

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