An Action is Not Just an Action

“Actions speak louder than words”

On any given day, a person decides on hundreds of actions to take or not to take. Some actions (or, equally, non-actions) in a day are negligible in relation to rest of your lifetime (such as deciding which favorite T.V. show you want to watch with your dinner tonight), while others can prove to have a greater impact for the near and distant future (like deciding whether or not to go to graduate school). With that in mind, similar to how actions convey decisions, actions can also intentionally or unintentionally communicate more or something other than expected.

One example of where a person taking an action does so with deliberation and intent is with high school students and the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign’s relatively recent Self-Reported Academic Record (SRAR) Admissions Process.

First, a little side-background…

Developed as a method to expedite the University’s new student admissions decision-making process, SRAR is supposed to deliver relevant student academic records to University Admissions as quickly as possible without the delay of waiting for sealed and mailed official high transcripts. SRAR relies on individual high school students to self-report their personal coursework and grades within their university admissions application by following detailed given instructions found in print on the application and in a video tutorial. When high school students fill out their SRARs, they are fully aware that the information they’re supplying is meant to be taken into consideration for admission into the University. At the same time, they are aware that they will need to send an official high school academic record if they are admitted and decide to go to the University. If, however, there are any discrepancies between their self-reported and official records, their admissions offer can be rescinded and, in the case of some fraudulent claims, the University may send a notice to other universities with similar admissions policies or within certain inter-university networks.

Since there are two actors in this example, there are to actions to examine. On one side, you have the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign’s Admissions department. On the other, you have a high school student applying to the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign with, for all extensive purposes, the desire to be admitted to the University (—reasons for which can vary from the pride of simply being admitted to because the University is his/her dream school). The actions taken by both actors revolve around the issue of submitting an accurate and truthful SRAR. University Admissions takes action by communicating their preference for an accurate and truthful SRAR through the detailed instructions they supply on their university application form, website, video tutorial, and email/phone contact. By taking the action to communicate through these various modes of instruction, the University Admissions department is deliberately signaling applicants of their preference for an accurate and truthful SRAR submission. Combining the previous University Admissions’ signaling action with the understanding of what the purpose and repercussions are for an applicant’s submission, the action of submitting an accurate or inaccurate SRAR discloses more than just an academic history—it reveals the student’s integrity and ability to carefully follow instructions. Thus, an applicant’s deliberate action of submitting an accurate or inaccurate SRAR speaks more to his/her character than whatever can be said in an admissions essay.

Conversely, other than deliberate actions, there are actions that communicate messages that the sender may have not intended. Take the example of the price-match guarantee policies of certain retailers. This policy states that if a customer finds (and, in most instances, brings proof) that the same product is available at a competitor store at a lower price, the retailer holding the policy will sell the consumer that same product at that lower price and/or give a refund if the product was already sold at the higher price. The retailer takes the action to adopt the price-match guarantee policy as a way to secure customer loyalty (and sales), especially around price-fluctuating holidays/seasons. Additionally, a retailer’s action to follow such a policy acts as an assurance or promise of price security to the retailer’s current or potential customers. Yet, while a retailer may advertise this policy to customers for the above reasons, it may also be unintentional threatening competitors to not start a price war. This threat, hidden due to the original action’s focus on notifying customers, announces to competitors that they should be wary of lowering their own prices. Not only will the earlier mentioned retailer’s customers (in some sense act as spies and) report back about any price changes but it would also lower its prices as well. So if a competitor continues to lower its prices, the retailer will follow suit with its price-match policy and eventually it would come to the point where both the retailer and competitor would have greatly reduced sales. The action to commit to a price-match policy as evident in a dip or lower quarterly/monthly/weekly sales figures of a competitor, even after a price reduction, demonstrates how this message, though inadvertent, can still be communicated from a retailer to its unintended competitor audience.

Time is Money

There are many things on a college campus that are allocated on a first come, first serve basis. While priority by seniority, athletics, honors program, or academic department is one deciding factor for determining who gets to register for a course first (if at all), course registration for the most part is still pretty much first come, first serve. Yet, for example, if the University of Illinois were to give each student an allocation of “Illinibucks”, which could be used for the sole purpose of moving to the head of the line at pre-specified prices (set by the campus), course registration wouldn’t be the only use for the currency. There are a number of other things on campus that follow the first come, first serve rule. Illinibucks could be used for jumping to the head of the line when it comes to deciding who gets to pick out their food and eat first in the dining halls of student residences, who gets to sit where in a large lecture class, who gets seen first for an appointment in the student health center for a non-immediately-life-threatening emergency, who gets to park where at what time near certain class buildings, who gets to schedule an appointment with an academic advisor during the busiest times of the semester, and who gets to move into their campus residence first. To really see how Illinibucks can affect the first come, first serve college ecosystem, we’ll need to take a closer look at an example.

Moving, in general, is stressful. Moving into a college residence is hectic. While some student residences, advertise early Move-In Dates, their student capacities are much more limited to that of university owned and operated housing. For Move-In Day, not only do you have to deal with finding parking for your moving van or convoy of family/friends’ cars carrying boxes of your living supplies and personal mementos, you have to maneuver around countless of people doing the same exact thing as you as you try to reach your eventual room for the next 9-10 months. Wouldn’t it be wonderful if you could get from Point A to Point B without having to wait for the next elevator to come or for that staircase or hallway to be unobstructed? Or, even, who can park the closest to a certain residence to unload their personal belongings? This is where having Illinibucks would come in handy.

So what would happen if the price was too low? Everyone would probably use their Illinibucks and their purpose would be rendered moot. If allowed to rise, the price for jumping ahead of the line to move in first could increase causing people to save and resulting in sporadic shocks of people jumping ahead of others from year to year or, if allowed to spend their Illinibucks elsewhere, causing people to choose to use their Illinibucks on things they consider to be more valuable than the hassle and time lost during Move-In Day. Even more, if Illinibucks were transferable and didn’t expire, I definitely could see a possible secondary market for Illinibucks forming, such as with the case of cigarettes used as currency in penitentiaries. Additionally, there’s the equal potential of a black market trade of Illinibucks to occur. In some sense, I could also possibly see Illinibucks becoming a wealth endowment of sorts for a family with a legacy of generation after generation attending the University of Illinois.

As something that started as a simple allocation of priority, Illinibucks would essentially become a currency in its own right on the university campus. Illinibucks, to a certain extent, is a currency that increases an endowment of which every person, each day, has the same and finite amount: time. What people decide to do with their endowment is based on their personal preferences. For some, there isn’t enough time in the day. For others, their far less busy schedule leaves room for them to be willing to wait in lines and give up or trade their Illinibucks for something they consider more worthwhile.

Especially in the intellectual environment that is college, students could come up with countless ways to creatively exchange and use the new “unofficial” university currency—the possibilities are endless. Adding faculty, staff, or graduate teaching assistants to the market would further add to the new invention of other possible uses of Illinibucks and potentially open up issues of moral hazard when it comes to students. For me personally, I would maybe use my Illinibucks on priority parking during winter or rainy days and getting an appointment at the health center. What would you use your Illinibucks for?

//Update//
I forgot to include that one reason that plays into my decision to not use my Illinibucks for Move-In Day priority is that I live in an apartment than in a student residence hall and for many apartments, the start date for moving in starts at least a week or more before those of student living facilities on campus and has an open-ended move-in end date. This and other factors like this that affect any one student's time endowment plays a major role in how they end u[ using their Illinibucks.

Opportunism & Ethics: Do They Go Hand-in-Hand or are They Two Opposite Sides of the Same Coin?

A while back, a couple of friends and I fell into one of those rather philosophical discussions that you can only get to late at night/early in the morning when you’ve been sleep-deprived and still can’t quite fall asleep. Sooner or later, like many other similar talks under similar circumstances, we end up reminiscing about our youth and years gone. Grant it, our “youth” was only a decade or so ago, it still has that air of nostalgia of times past, moments lost, and opportunities not taken.

It was sixth grade. Religion class in a Catholic middle school. Whether it was the part of the year when the class was learning about various other religions or more about the Catholic faith, we couldn’t quite remember. All that is certain is that there was a test. The test wasn’t particularly long: around one page without too many questions. I was nearing the end of it when our teacher left the room. Apparently, he was gone for some time because a class mate of ours noticed that he left the test’s answers on his desk and began to read out the answer sheet in class. By then I had finished my exam. I had studied all the previous night and felt pretty prepared, but after the correct answers were read out, I noticed that I got a question wrong. At that moment, I contemplated whether or not I should change my answer. From a young age, we were told that cheating was wrong. But when it comes down to it, how far are you willing to go to get ahead in life? Does one little act of “cutting-corners” really make a person more tolerable of cutting bigger corners in the future?

Our teacher came back, none the wiser and every single person, except me, received a 100% on that exam. I’m not claiming that I was the only person who didn’t cheat that day. There were probably a couple people in class who were going to get a perfect score even without the help of the teacher’s answer sheet. Nor am I claiming that I had the highest morals in the class either. After all, I was no whistleblower.

The situation had two incidences where I could have acted opportunistically. One, with replacing the question I got wrong with the correct answer and two, by telling our teacher what had just happened when he came back. I’m not exactly sure why I didn’t act on either opportunity. For one, I don’t if it was a personal moral standard that I held for myself at the time more so than just general feelings that it was wrong to do so, especially in, ironically enough, of all classes, a religion class. For the second opportunity, I don’t know if it was a lack of a moral backbone or fear of retaliation by my classmates who would have been punished; there’s nothing quite like peer pressure or adolescent alienation and childhood bullying to ruin the rest of your school year. There was also the possibility that I too would be punished as well—there was no proof that I wasn’t an active participant who happened to “chicken out”; people still get penalized for being an accessory to a crime. Even admitting this on a blog makes me rather nervous.

In the long-run, that one exam didn’t really jeopardize my overall grade. But what if it did? Would I have acted differently knowing that I wouldn’t have been caught? Am I really better off now because of how I acted then?

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Since we’ll be talking about how to encourage good citizenship behavior, I thought these excerpts from some articles I found, sheds some additional light in incentivizing good citizenry in the realm of the issue of cheating.

To create an environment to not induce cheating, you need to know what kind of environment incites it:

“Campbell's Law, created by social scientist Donald Campbell more than 30 years ago, states that measuring effectiveness with a single influential metric invites corruption. In other words, measuring a student's performance based on a single standardized test score or one major project/exam per semester encourages unethical behavior.” (75 to 98 Percent of College Students Have Cheated, http://education-portal.com/articles/75_to_98_Percent_of_College_Students_Have_Cheated.html)

“‘Cheating is more widespread at the nation's colleges and universities than it was years ago because it no longer carries the stigma it used to. Less social disapproval and increased competition for spots in graduate schools have made students more willing to do whatever it takes to get the grades,’ so says Professor McCabe [Professor and Associate Provost, Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey, and Founder of The Center for Academic Integrity]. ‘If a student feels disadvantaged because others are cheating and seeming to get away with it, they'll say: I'm not stupid enough to blow my chances by not doing the same.’ McCabe also comments that many schools stopped paying serious attention to cheating as they felt the need to focus more on problems such as campus safety and substance abuse.

Professor McCabe's research has revealed the following indicators for cheating:

Institutional:

Campus norm

No honor code

Penalties not severe

Faculty support of academic integrity policies is low

Little chance of being caught

Higher incidence at larger, less selective institutions

Personal:

Business and engineering majors are most likely to cheat

Future plans include business

Men self-report cheating more than women

Fraternity and Sorority members

Younger students

Students with lower GPA's (or those at the very top)

Others doing it

Faculty members disinterested

Required courses not in their major

No stated rules or rules unclear

Heavy workload”

(Academic Cheating Background, http://www.glass-castle.com/clients/www-nocheating-org/adcouncil/research/cheatingbackgrounder.html)

Also, sometimes people are unable to differentiate between good and bad behavior because of a lack of clarity of what the situation really is and what is or is not acceptable behavior:

(200 Students Admit To 'Cheating' On Exam... But Bigger Question Is If It Was Really Cheating Or Studying, http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20101118/21485811928/200-students-admit-to-cheating-exam-bigger-question-is-if-it-was-really-cheating-studying.shtml)

The Transaction Costs of Transference

As is the case of many Registered Student Organizations (RSOs) on a university campus, there’s always some difficulty transferring leadership responsibilities from one year’s group to the next. For some reason or another, some RSOs seem to have an easier time at this than others. Unfortunately, I happened to be in one in the latter category.

Each year and each semester, one particular committee of the RSO had quite a hard time getting back on its metaphoric feet. This committee (which I’ll call “C” for short from now on) provided a service for other RSOs on campus and, at the beginning of each semester, came face-to-face with two recurring obstacles.

1)     Getting the committee started by matching managers and teams to client RSOs

2)     Maintaining  past client RSO relationships

Each semester brought a new roster of old and new managers, team members, and client RSOs. Equally, each semester, meant new class and work schedules for the students who made up that roster. So, consequently, each semester also meant that managers had to be reacquainted with a new batch of team members and, at times, new clients as well. This wouldn’t seem to be that big of an obstacle to overcome but there was another, more bureaucratic, issue in the mix. C wasn’t technically allowed to start until the general RSO as a whole had its first meeting which wasn’t until a month or so after the semester started. Moreover, it was during that time period that client RSOs needed C’s services the most. Even when C finally coordinated its manager, team member, and client schedules, more time was needed for each set of manager-team member groups to re-learning from scratch information about client RSOs.

By the time all of the above was done, there was very little time left of the semester for C’s groups to carry out projects contracted by clients and as a result C’s value to its clients dropped. Even more, all the lags in communication from C’s executive leaders gave rise to an increase in imperfect commitment by managers and team members alike.

The situation faced by C is reminiscent of the organizational dilemma of what decisions should be made by the hub versus its spokes. C was unable to react quickly to the needs of clients because the executives of the RSO felt that C’s meetings shouldn’t supersede its main general meetings. At the same time, managers were limited in both ability to decide their teams and opportunity to share past client knowledge with other managers. Thus C incurred both coordination and motivation transaction costs as an outcome of organizational inefficiencies.

My Decision to Take a Class on the Economics of Organizations

The reasons why I’m taking a class on the Economics of Organizations lies partly in my motivations for pursuing an Econ degree and to understand that, you’ll need a little context.

More often than not, following the response that I major in Economics is the follow-up question: “So… What are you going to do with that?” For some of the lucky few who have experienced at least one Economics course in their college lifetime, the thought of majoring in Econ offers up a sigh of mixed admiration and respect as they recollect long nights trying to apply rational principles to an irrational world. For others, Economics leaves nothing more than hazy memories of graphs shifting every which way, the basic relationship between supply and demand, and, in some cases, the notion that Economics is about studying the economy. Combined, the above two takeaways by non-Econ majors point to a deeper, underlying question: “Why would someone want to spend four years studying something like Economics that is both difficult AND not explicitly ‘practical’ in the real world?”

After people realize that I’m not really intending to work in the government for the economy or become an Econ Professor, they wonder why I didn’t choose something more practical like engineering or some business major like accounting or finance that can be directly translatable into a career. To be honest, sometimes I wonder that too. But if this past year has taught me anything, it has showed me how very real world-applicable Economics can be.

To me, distilled at its core, Economics is the study of how people go about making decisions maximizing their benefit given scarce/limited resources—“People” meaning consumers, firms, governments, the average the American, you, or any other human for that matter. It’s the weighing in of opportunities and costs or, to use economic jargon, opportunity costs. Personally, I find the process of how people negotiate between choices fascinating. With that said, you can say that I see the field of Economics more so from the perspective of Microeconomics—of Information Economics or Behavioral Economics—than from the standpoint of Macroeconomics’ aggregates. Consequently, it is this interest in Information and Behavioral Economics that largely contributed to my decision to take a class on the Economics of Organization. Additionally, it doesn’t hurt that a couple recent-past analyst job interviews that I’ve participated in asked questions concerning information asymmetries pertaining to negotiating a price, problem-solving supply chain communication issues, or deciding to take on a personal or corporate investment risk. (An example of an Econ degree’s real world applicability by way of game theory)

So while I hope the class on the Economics of Organizations can shed more light on some more real world-related skills on organizational systems, overall, I would like to improve my ability of seeing the world through an Economic mindset.

As for the class’s format, first, I find it rather exciting treating how the class is organized as a social experiment in organization. Rarely or never have I had an Economics class that actually applied its in-class taught principles during the length of the course. I think it will be interesting to see how the experiment plays out. Second, I think that a presentation component or an in-class case experiment/exercise/activity would be beneficial in learning lasting concepts. Last but not least, I like being able to take additional notes on PowerPoints during class so having the slides at least a couple minutes/hours before is extremely beneficial in helping me follow the thought-flow of whatever is being discussed.