Grades Are Posted....

....both in Moodle and Banner.

Happy holidays!

Grades in Moodle have been updated

Here's the new stuff

Excel Homework

10 points for Excel HW #7 if that was submitted.   Then I added a column called Excel Bonus.  It has 30 points.  Every student got that.  The original plan was 10 homework assignments.  There were 100 points allocated to this in the syllabus.  So it was a way to bring that into balance.

Blog Posts

I tracked submissions for blog posts 9 and 10.  I also put in scores and comments for Blog posts second half.  The maximum possible score was 125.  I was pretty generous assigning points here, in my humble opinion.

Running Total

I added a column at the end to say how many cumulative points you've achieved to date.  The maximum possible, counting the 50 point bonus that everyone got, is 700.

What is not there

I didn't assign points yet for the comments you did.  There is a 50 point maximum on that.  I will assign those at the same time I grade the final.  Truthfully, this gives me a bit more of a fudge factor, based on the performance I see on the final exam.  This is worth 300 points at the max, so there are still 350 points to allocate.  Some incentive in the course is rear-loaded, by design.

Good luck with your other exams.

The Final Exam is in our regular classroom

There is a different room posted, but that is for extra space only.

Candidate Questions for the Final

I have decided NOT to distribute last year's exam.  When I did that for the midterms, it produced what I perceived to be memorization of the solution I offered up.  I'd much prefer you to generate your own solution and give it in your own words.  So I'm trying a different approach in an attempt to deter some of the memorization.

Of course, you can post questions (as comments to this post) and I will respond to them.  But I will do so without providing a full answer to the question that you can memorize in toto.

Also, you can schedule a meeting with me if you'd like.  I'm happy to discuss this or any other course issue with you.

There are six candidate questions below and three will be chosen from the six.  Two are new to you.
You haven't seen them before and are on the last portion of the course.  The other four you have seen either the question as posed or something similar.  These are questions on the content of Midterm 1 and Midterm 2 that didn't appear on those exams.

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The New Questions:

A.  This question concerns shirking and explicit incentives to prevent it, as well as the consequences on market equilibrium.  Compare and contrast the static principal-agent model with random output to the Shapiro-Stiglitz model.  Discuss the underlying assumptions, how incentives for putting forth effort are provided, and the consequence on equilibrium, from both the contractual perspective and the market perspective.  Also discuss for each model whether or not there is a role for government to play to improve market performance.

B.  This question concerns innovative practice in the the setting of the repeated Prisoner's Dilemma.  Employees with some responsibility allocated to them may be quite diligent in doing their established work, so shirking per se is not an issue at all, but they may be very reluctant to try out new approaches for fear of being blamed when an experiment along those lines blows up in their faces.  There are various possible solutions to this issue:
     (i) provide large rewards for experiments that succeed,
     (ii) pool experiments across several employees each with some responsibility so responsibility is shared,
    (iii) punish work groups if they don't show innovation over time.
     (iv) possibly other mechanisms that might occur to you.

Discuss the pros and cons of each of these and discuss how the organization might come to a particular approach in trying to encourage organization members to be innovative.

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Candidate Questions from Midterm 1

C.  This question concerns transfer prices.  Provide a working definition for what a transfer price is.  In a for-profit organization how should ownership (shareholders) want the transfer price to be set?  Explain why others in the organization might want the transfer price to be set differently.  What transfer price would these others like to see?  When service quality is jointly set with the transfer price, what service quality would ownership like to see?  Explain why this is the case.  Others may want a different service quality level.  Explain how their preferred service quality level differs from what ownership wants.

D.  This question concerns economic efficiency concepts.  There is a partial equilibrium concept and a general equilibrium concept.  Describe each of these.  Do the two concepts always coincide?  If not, under what additional assumptions do they coincide.  Provide an argument for why we should expect efficient outcomes.  Economic efficiency has been critiqued on several grounds. Explain some of these criticisms and provide settings where the particular critique appears valid.

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Candidate Questions from Midterm 2

E. This question concerns procurement. Discus why in government agencies procurement is subject to  regulation. What is the regulation aimed at preventing? What does it try to accomplish? Explain why during the bidding process the lowest price bidder may not be selected, although the process is competitive. Discuss the various goals the agency conducting the procurement may have going into the process.

F. This question concerns conflict in organizations and, in particular, Model 1 and Model 2 of Schon and Argyris. Explain how a manager can without intending to do so cause the staff under him to be angry with his management approach. What is it that causes their anger? What are the consequences for the unit when the manager behaves this way? Explain the Schon and Argyris recommendation about how the manager might diffuse the tension. Why does their recommendation have a chance to be effective?

About the Final Exam

The final will be a different format than the midterms.  It will be an all essay test.  There will be no math-like problems as on the midterms.  The essay questions may cover topics we have math modeled, but they will ask for a discussion of the issues, not derivation of a bunch of equations.

As has been the practice, I will make the candidate questions known ahead of time.  There will be six candidate questions.  Three will be chosen.  You can count on one of those being on content covering the reputations and dynamic incentives, since you haven't been tested on that yet.  The other questions can come from material done earlier in the semester.

The Final is worth 300 points, yet I'm only having three essay questions, not six of them.  This is so I can grade the thing in a reasonable time frame.  So each essay will be worth 100 points.  This doesn't mean you have to write twice as much as you wrote on the midterms.  It does mean I will be a little sterner grading the essays on the final.

Grades Have Been Uploaded in Moodle

I uploaded the Midterm 2 grades into Moodle as well as for Excel Homeworks 5 and 6.  There is also a histogram of the exam scores in Moodle.

I have no yet updated the blog post tracking.  I started to poop out doing the clerical work and better to not make errors.  So I will do it tomorrow before class.

Also, I haven't decided about another bonus.  I will leave that for another day.

There ultimately will be only one more Excel homework and two more blog posts.  That will give us 10 blog posts, which was my goal at the outset, but I originally planned for 10 Excel homeworks.  So we are clearly falling short of that and some grade adjustment needs to be made for that to get my scale to work properly.

I will return the exams tomorrow in class and we will briefly review the text before getting into our discussion about reputations.

Reminder - Blog Post Due Tomorrow

Here is the prompt:

The topic is personal reputations and their role in influencing behavior. Describe some domain where you have a strong reputation with others (it could be with friends, it could be with your family, it could be at some place you worked, etc). Then discuss how your reputation developed. Consider what you do to keep your reputation intact or enhance it further. Finally, reflect on whether there are occasions where you'd like to stray from the behavior suggested by your reputation and what you do on those occasions. Have you ever "cashed it in" by which I mean you abandon your reputation altogether in favor of some immediate gain?

Link to Test from Last Year and Candidate Essay Questions for Exam

Last year's midterm 2.

Candidate Questions

A.  This question concerns procurement.  Discus why in government agencies procurement is subject to  regulation.  What is the regulation aimed at preventing?  What does it try to accomplish?  Explain why during the bidding process the lowest price bidder may not be selected, although the process is competitive.  Discuss the various goals the agency conducting the procurement may have going into the process.

B.  This question concerns conflict in organizations and, in particular, Model 1 and Model 2 of Schon and Argyris.  Explain how a manager can without intending to do so cause the staff under him to be angry with his management approach.  What is it that causes their anger?  What are the consequences for the unit when the manager behaves this way?  Explain the Schon and Argyris recommendation about how the manager might diffuse the tension.  Why does their recommendation have a chance to be effective?

C.  This question concerns an agent who while performing the same function serves two different principals.  What are some examples where this situation emerges?  What problems are created that don't exist in the case where there is a single principal?  Explain what "capture" means and how it arises in this context.  What might be done to discourage capture?

Because attendance was low in class today...

I'm posting an announcement I made there.  This regards our upcoming exam to be held a week from Thursday.

On Thursday morning before class I will post
(1)  Last year's midterm 2 and
(2) Three candidate essay questions.  One of those will be on this year's midterm.

Our review session is a week from today.

Also, as a quick summary of what we covered today we discussed:
(a)  The blog posts and the underlying issues with the triangle principal-agent problem.
(b)  More about procurement.
(c)  B&D chapter 7 and 13 on how to really motivate employees to be highly productive.

I view this stuff as the most fun part of the course.  I'm sorry that many of you missed.  I may write up a long post  to highlight the points we discussed.  I don't really want to encourage people to miss class, but some of this may be on the exam, so you should be prepared for that.

Video about Principal-Agent model and associated Powerpoint

This is the video I mentioned in class.  I made a slight goof in the recording, so there is more black on the sides than there should be.  If you watch it full screen and on a computer it shouldn't matter.  On a phone, it might be too small.  This is much more detail than I provided in class last week.  It covers the algebra of the two state model and that is done in some depth.  On the last slide there is an embedded spreadsheet that gives the graphical approach to the same model.  It might be too much for you.  The Excel homework (which I hope to post tomorrow) does the graphical approach in a step by step manner.

pptx file

This time there is no pdf file.

If you have questions about the video or the PowerPoint, please post those as comments to this post.

Class Session Next Tuesday - Content and a little party

For next Tuesday, please read B&D chapter 8 ahead of time.  You will enjoy it because it will seem pretty realistic to you and is also quite informative about a real workplace issue - conflict and how to navigate it.

The PowerPoint for the session is available as is the associated PDF.

* * * * *

This is entirely unrelated to the course.  I came into some inheritance this afternoon, so I am in the mood to celebrate.  I thought we'd have a little party during the class session - I will bring some treats for everyone to partake in.  Not that we really need this right before Halloween, but it's appropriate to share the good cheer.

Reminder - Blog Post Due This Friday.

Please read this piece which if reframed for our class is about team production versus individual production and its relationship to how rewards are shared. http://campaignstops.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/02/20/how-to-get-the-rich-to-share-the-marbles/?ref=opinion Then see if you can come up with your own example of team production and discuss whether the conclusions in this piece jive with your experience.

For Tomorrow's Review Session

Please come prepared with your questions.  This session will be most useful if you drive it.  I will go over solutions to last year's midterm, but for the rest of the time it would be good for you to be getting points of confusion cleared up.

The topic for Thursday's class

We will talk about signaling (the person with the private information taking a costly action to communicate what the information is) and inference (what the uninformed party interprets from the signal).  There will not be a PowerPoint for this.  But if you have read the book Moneyball (or even if you have just seen the movie) that might be good preparation.

1973 job market signalling.pdf via kwout

I will use this piece in our discussion of inference.  It should be relevant to you. 

Practice Midterm and Survey Results Are Available

Practice Midterm

Survey Results

Post queries about current Excel homework at the link below

A thread has already been started here, so just keep it going

Early Feedback Survey

If you have a few minutes could you please complete the linked survey.  People should now be pretty familiar with the work patterns in the class.  So it is a good time to take the class's temperature and see how things are going.  I'll share the results in class next week.

Materials in Preparation of Class for Tuesday 9/24

We will be starting in on the economics of risk and uncertainty.  These are background materials.  There are a couple of videos to watch and a document to read.  I hope the document is mostly familiar stuff.  If it is not, please let me know.  Please review these before class on Tuesday.  I expect to do other things and hope this stuff is understood.  There will be a follow up Excel homework on this to test your understanding.

Background document on math and philosophy of  probability.
PDF File

Increasing Risk and Risk Aversion
Micro-lecture (screen capture video with my voice over).
Associated PowerPoint file.

Graphical Approach to Risk Aversion
Micro-lecture 
Associated Excel file.

OPML file for tracking student posts

If you import this file into a reader you can track the student posts in the class.  Download the file first.  Know where you put it.  Then open a reader such as Feedreader.com or Feedspot.com.   You have to open the Settings area to find the import control.  Then simply navigate to the OPML file and click.

Each of your blog posts should now have a comment from me

I went through the blog posts that I'm aware of and commented on each one.  In my records there were 18 of these.  There are currently 28 students in the class.  If you are in that group of 10 who has not yet made a blog and a post about your alias, it is not too late to do so and I encourage you to get that done.  Email me with the url for the blog when you're done.

There were 20 students who completed the first Excel homework.  As with the the first blog post, it is not too late to do this for credit.  Please try to get it done asap.

I'm going to wait a bit before posting anything in the Moodle grade book.  If you've done the required work so far, know that I'm tracking it.  I'd like everyone else to catch up first.

There will be another blog post due this coming Friday and you can start in now on the Excel homework that is due a week from Wednesday.  Better to stay ahead of the curve, if you can.