Reflection

There were many lessons I enjoyed learning this semester and one which I had not been aware before concerned transaction costs. Transaction costs are prevalent everywhere in society and they directly affect organizations. The biggest take away I learned from our lessons on transaction costs revolved around those that have already affected me. For example, the search and information transaction costs that affected how I chose which apartment to live in. On the other hand, the other lessons I learned about transaction costs, like contract enforcement, I am sure will serve me well in my career. I also think transaction costs are important to learn because they are mostly neglected or hidden from the obvious costs organizations deal with. However, by an organization realizing all their transaction costs they can limit them and help spur growth in their organization.

Overall, I enjoyed the way the class was structured. Personally, I enjoy online classes and try to take as many as possible. This is because they are extremely flexible and can be done virtually at anytime from anywhere with an internet connection. However, sometimes it is hard to reinforce whether or not you have learned anything because you are not getting any direct feedback form an authority figure. That's why I thought the structure of this class was unique and solved this problem. A majority of the class work was online and you necessarily did not need to be present in class to complete the assignments. However, after class or during class Professor Arvan could reiterate the important takeaways we should be learning from class. I found this balance between a small class with a physical teacher and a multitude of online sources to learn beneficial to my learning style.

I usually would start blogging Friday night or Saturday morning. It takes me around an hour to organize my thought and choose exactly which idea I want to address the prompt with. It also takes some trial and error choosing the right topics to fully address the prompt. After I was finally able to organize my thoughts and decide what I would write about it took about another hour or two writing them all out and editing them. So, overall blog posts took around 2 to 3 hours depending on the topic. Addressing some blog posts were rather difficult since I had no experience in the topic and would have to choose to write about a movie or show. Not being able to relate to the topic at hand sometimes made it harder to come up with sustenance too write about. However, I quite enjoyed addressing the prompts with my own personal life since I think everyone likes and finds it easy to talk about themselves. It also gave me a chance to take a step back and see how my experiences in the workforce and organizations so far have been serving me experience wise. Likewise, some excel homework assignments were more enjoyable than others. It's hard to say how long an excel homework would take since some would take up to three hours watching the videos and completing it when some others only took about an hour. Overall, the excel homework assignments brought the material full circle connecting the class material to the math and the general concepts we discussed in class. More than once the excel homework assignments furthered my understanding of the material.

I would have liked to have seen how more of the economics or organizations lessons play out in real life in world organizations. For example, more specifically in technology organizations involving organization like Snapchat, Facebook or even bitcoin. I find some of the lessons I probably got the most out of were the ones where Professor Arvan tied his own experience working for the University into the lesson. Learning how Professor Arvan negotiated contracts and dealt with things like transaction costs and agents were the most beneficial to my learning, This is because I learned the concept then I also learned how it played out in the real world. It also motivated me to pay attention to those concepts because I saw they had real world applications. Sometimes the theory can be a little overwhelming so it was refreshing to hear the experience of Professor Arvan's long and successful career. I feel personal insight on how people have made their career successful as individuals on a small scale setting where you can ask questions is probably something that could be beneficial to every student. That is because students want to know how actual careers work. Likewise I would like to see more information regarding technological organizations. It might be hard since they are so new, but I feel learning about the economics of organizations like Facebook would be beneficial.