First, to review the course in a more opinionated fashion, this
class turned out to be what I expected. I mean this as a compliment. To be
honest, I only picked Economics of Organizations over Financial Economics
because the latter filled up too quickly, but by the time the semester started,
the former had grown on me as a potentially interesting class. It was certainly
of benefit that the subject matter of the class was already fascinating to me
before the semester started. I was more motivated to do well than some of my
other courses. Academically speaking, this was the most intriguing class of my
semester schedule. Not to say I didn’t have any problems with it, but I’ll get
to that later.
From a learning standpoint, most of the models we dealt with were
new to me. I’ve already learned about risk aversion to some degree, but for the
most part, I had never encountered most of the information covered. This
includes the Principal-Agent model, the Shapiro and Stiglitz model, and
essentially all the other models referenced in the Excel homework. On a side
note, Bolman and Deal’s “Reframing Organizations” was worth reading. The
material in the book did for me what it set out to do: looking at the same
situation from different frames of reference.
The class structure had some interesting elements to it. The
combination of the in-class discussions, blog posts, and Excel homework was
mostly advantageous to the learning process. I’ll start with the blog posts. If
there was one thing I struggled with in this class, it’d be the blog posts. I
often found myself with very little to say, and I rarely felt confident that my
examples were particularly relevant. In other words, I routinely felt as though
I was missing the point of the prompt. Maybe it was just me, but perhaps a few
extra minutes of prior explanation would have helped. Pre-writing helped
alleviate this a little, though. Overall, the blog posts were still an understandable
addition to the class and, in combination with the review of the posts on
Mondays, were essential to the learning process.
The Excel homework was done well for the purposes of this class.
They weren’t always easy, but I wouldn’t say they were ever particularly
difficult either. First and foremost, the format was excellent. Being able to
immediately know when you’ve made a mistake made even the most difficult of the
Excel homework assignments, which for me was Insurance under Asymmetric
Information, manageable with the right amount of effort and patience. The
difficulty was also incentive to read everything closely rather than just
skimming. However, completing the Excel homework was usually a frustrating time
of the week for the aforementioned reasons, and the accompanying videos were
time-consuming in a few instances. Nevertheless, there was always a sense of
accomplishment for every assignment completed.
Lastly, there were the in-class discussions. They were generally
easy to follow, and they were great for clarification. I never really felt I
fully understood something until it was discussed in class. Not until class on
Mondays did I get a good grasp on the implications of the blog posts, and not
until Wednesdays did I get a good grasp on the implications of the Excel
homework. The questions given didn’t always get a response, but they did lead
to some deeper thinking. At least for me, there were plenty of “Aha” moments once
the answer was eventually given. If I could change anything about the in-class
meetings, a little more focus and structure wouldn’t hurt. At the same time,
the relaxed structure of the in-class discussions was still beneficial in
general.
Overall, I enjoyed the class.
