Grades Posted in Moodle

If you go into the class Moodle site you will find a new discussion forum which has your course grade in it and a little summary remark.  Also, if you go to the Grades link on the left you will see all your component scores to show how your grade was determined.

I'll put the grades in Banner in a bit.  Good luck on the rest of this week.

Tidbits for Tuesday

• I will bring donuts for our last class session/review of the semester.  If you want coffee or some other beverage, that's on you. 
• There are blog posts due in advance of the session (preferably by tomorrow evening, which is the scheduled time).  Comments are not required this week, since we don't have a Thursday class.  But if you read somebody else's post and want to react to it by all means do.  
• I will also go over how I will determine final course grades.  
• This is not required but you might find this piece on Stanford from the most recent issue of the New Yorker more than a little interesting, and perhaps quite a contrast to your own college experience.  

For Our Last Class Session Next Tuesday

I'd like to talk about the following piece in conjunction with a tiny bit on the organization as a culture and our wrap up.

The Creative Monopoly - NYTimes.com via kwout

A couple of videos to watch before class on Tuesday

We're talking about Executive Compensation on Tuesday.  I encourage you to watch these videos to make the topic more real for you.  This first one is from Forbes.  It's about CEO pay in the 500 largest companies. The video is in the middle of the page.  One obvious fact that emerges from this is that the bulk of the pay is from the cashing in of prior accumulated stock or stock options.   Some of these CEOs take very little in salary.   Another interesting thing is how Forbes measures company performance - by growth rate in stock share value over an extended period.  This makes sense if the market evaluates the company's balance sheet accurately.

The other video is from the NewsHour last Wednesday, about Citigroup Shareholders rejecting a pay package for their CEO.  This is news worthy because of its novelty.  Indeed, M&R says this can't happen, that it's the Board that sets CEO compensation, the shareholders having no say in the matter.  But that has changed recently as a consequence of Dodd-Frank regulation.  It's certainly interesting to ask whether this new form of governance will have a retarding impact on CEO compensation, particularly at companies that don't perform well by the Forbes metric.

Less Is More

During the middle of today's presentation, it occurred to me I should have given more guidance on how to conduct these sessions.  In today's session Big Bang "covered" the entire chapter in B&D,  with slides both on the examples and all the points in the chapter.  That approach gives breadth but not much depth.  It would be better for the subsequent presentations to focus on some key aspect of the chapter and then get into it deeper.  Try for examples not in the book.  See if you can hit a nerve with the other students in the class.  Also, if your team wants that, you can lead the discussion of the posts, if you think that will help you get into your topic.  Just let me know if you want to do that.

Thursday's Class/Today's low attendance

On Thursday we will cover B&D Chapter 8 on interpersonal conflict.  I believe it will have the highest take away for you of any class this semester.  However, among the blog posts I read for this weak, you mainly avoided the issue by talking about group projects where other members of the group want to shirk, and you ended up doing most/all of the work. This may not be a pleasing outcome from your point of view, but it might very well be the efficient solution under the circumstances.  So I hope you can think about other examples, where shirking isn't the problem but rather where the problem is disagreement about the goals for the group and/or disagreement about the best way to achieve those goals.  Further the disagreement have had led to some members of the group being angry, in an overt way, or passive-aggressive in a less overt way.  That's what we want to talk about.  It's not fun.  But it's real.

- - -

Today attendance was less than 50% for the first time this semester.  Among the students who didn't show up, I've heard from one.  What's the story with the rest of you?

Second Set of Team Presentations

We should allocated these tomorrow, or Thursday at the latest.  These are each from B&D, on the Politics Frame.  They are:

4/12  B&D Chapter 9 on Power, Conflict, and Coalition

4/19  B&D Chapter 10 on The Manager as Politician

4/26  B&D Chapter 11 - Organizations as Political Arenas

Note that we will have discussion of blog posts before the presentations.  The prompts will be relevant for these topics.

Assessment of your work in Moodle

I've now set up two different discussion groups in Moodle.  One is for your individual work.  The other is for your team work.  Each student should now have a written assessment of their individual work called Blog Posts - First Half.  If this functions the way it is supposed to, you should be able to read your own assessment but not see the assessment of any other student.  Please let me know if that is the case.

I've also done an assessment of the Cool Kids' presentation from last Tuesday.  From here on out, I will try to do team assessments a day or so after the presentation has occurred.

Later this week I'll provide some assessments of the comments you've done so far.

The week after break I'll assign the second presentations, which will be from B&D.

Reminder - Schedule meetings we me

This is just a quick reminder to set up a time for your team to discuss the presentation it will do (that is for teams A and C) and also for you to set up individual appointments for discussing your blog posts and online work (so far only one student has done that).  Please do this via email, suggesting a preferred time and a couple of alternative slots too.

Presentation Schedule

These are the dates for the three presentations:

Tuesday March 6 - Spence and Zeckhauser
Tuesday March 13 - Shapiro and Stiglitz
Thursday March 29 - Alchian and Demsetz

Teams need to be be prepared for these presentations for them to be worthwhile.  I hope non-presenters have also tried to work their way through these papers.  It will help with the class discussion.  I will be posting tips/notes for reading the paper so you can make headway into them.

Where we are this week

Tomorrow my aim is to begin with the PowerPoint from the seventh class session in the middle.  We did the early part on transfer pricing last Thursday.  So we'll start with Management and Coordination by other means than price.  You'll note that price creeps back into the the discussion.  This covers the first part of chapter 4 in M&R.  The inspiration is a paper by Weitzman called Prices and Quantities.  I will also spend a little time here talking about what I know regarding "project management" which I hope will make the discussion a bit more realistic.

After that I'd like to have a conversation based on your posts for this week - about possibly bringing price in to partially alleviate situations where students have to wait to get something on campus.

Time willing, we'll then go onto the PowerPoint for the eighth class session, the bulk of which is on B&D chapter 3, which introduces the structural frame.  What we don't get to tomorrow we'll get to on Thursday.

I've been having a hard time trying to produce something reasonable on the second half of chapter 4 in M&R particularly the part on information efficiency in selecting the type of controls.  So I will write up my reflection later this evening, to indicate the source of my misgivings.  We'll discuss that on Thursday as well.  Incidentally, the reasons I suggested you read that piece on the Lessons from Tal Afar are tied to the misgivings.  The issues are quite similar to what I wrote about in my Uncertainty paper that is linked on the Useful Links Tab.

The last part of chapter 4 on increasing returns, core competency and complementarities, all of which you can describe with one term, "positioning," should be straightforward enough in conception.  We'll spend some time getting the jargon right and making sure we understand what is at issue.  At the moment there are no slides for that part. I'm guessing we won't get to that till next Tuesday, but if it seems likely we'll do it this Thursday, I'll produce some slides tomorrow.

Also, I promised to have for you the schedule of your presentations.  We'll do that on Thursday.

I'm hoping the weather is not too bad tomorrow.  I hate being out in freezing rain!

A different type of reading for Tuesday

While we will continue on the  issue of coordination from an economics perspective, I also want to cover this piece, The Lesson from Tal Afar, a piece from about six years ago in the New Yorker.  It is about the Iraq War, but I believe it shows the management dilemma very well, which is why we will discuss it.  It also happens to be a terrific read, so you should enjoy it, just for that.

Blog Posts and Comments

I heard from one student who was having trouble getting Blogger to post what had already been written.  There are a couple of other posts missing from some students.

Do note this is the first week where comments by students are expected.  They can't comment if they have a post to comment on.

PowerPoint for seventh class session posted

We will cover this stuff on Tuesday after we conclude our discussion about market failure, which is from the PowerPoint on the sixth class session.

I will try to get the PowerPoint for Thursday up later today.  If it is not up by the time the Super Bowl starts, expect it to be available before noon tomorrow.

New Version of PowerPoint for Sixth Session

I made an amended version of the PowerPoint today, with some additional slides and with all those omitted symbols included.  You can see the slides at the link, but to get the speaker notes, you have to download the original.

The PowerPoint for the sixth class session is now available

Note that it gets through market failure.  We'll do the stuff on transfer pricing next week.  That means the stuff for next Thursday should be mostly review of intermediate micro.

Also note that partly to simply get the thing done and partly because of the nature of the topic, there is a lot of text in the slides themselves, which is something I normally don't like.  If I have time, I may go back to them and update in my preferred style, where I can.

Update on PowerPoints for the week

I know I've promised to have PowerPoint for Tuesday and Thursday done this evening.  The one for Tuesday is available.  But I'm pooping out now and rather than do something of lower quality, I'll get the Thursday one done by tomorrow morning.  Sorry for the delay.

Professor Arvan

Assessment doc + Where we will begin next Tuesday

There is now a document entitled Proposed Method of Assessment.  It includes what we discussed in classed last Thursday about how students should be evaluated as well as a section on how this translates into letter grades.  Have a look at it at your earliest convenience.  Students are invited to add comments or make modifications to the document.  I will freeze it next Saturday and we'll go with what is there at the time.  

Last class we didn't get through the full Powerpoint for the Fourth Class Session.  We got through slide ten, which is the first on transaction costs.  We concluded class with the nature of transaction costs - the holdup problem.  After each party become locked in with the other, one wants to renegotiate terms in its favor.  

Starting With Textbook Content On Tuesday

Relative to the original schedule I posted last week, we are behind by one class session now.  We will be doing M&R chapter 1 and B&D chapter 1 this Tuesday.

I will update the calendar entries in the next day or so to reflect where we are and what we will cover in the next few class sessions.

Since our course is not a pre-requisite for any other undergraduate course here, I feel no obligation to cover a pre-specified amount of material.  We'll let our discussions dictate the pace in class.

Student Blogs Items

The gadget for Student Blogs in the left sidebar has, for the time being, my blogs, simply so I could get the thing started and verify the feeds work.  Once students make their own blogs I'll add them to the list and then delete mine.