John Hicks Econ 490 fall 2017 Blog

Christmas is coming, so the fall semester will comes to an end. I experienced a fall semester that was the total opposite of a semester in Amsterdam. Especially the class structure and the weekly deadlines in this course let me feel like I was in high school again. As I have wrote in an earlier post, the fall semester in Amsterdam consists of two 8-week courses and one 4-week course. Now that it is the end, I can say that I believe that I have learned more in certain topics than that I would have done back in Amsterdam. The build up of study material in courses that last the entire semester, such as our course, is more clearly compared to a stuffed 8-week course. I liked the build up of the study material in this course. It started quite easy with the Efficiency Principle with the Game Theory and the Efficiency and Equity Concepts. These concepts weren’t new for me and I was afraid that I wouldn’t learn a lot of new concepts. However, as the semester went on, and especially after ...

In the workplace there can be a standard principal-agent relationship or a more realistic triangle relationship. In this triangle, the agent deals with two different principals. This occurs mostly in situations where the agent has multiple interests. For example as a salesman, one goal is to sell as much as possible and the other goal is to satisfy the buyer. My experience with the triangle principal-agent model comes from my job as a waiter in a restaurant. During the last year of my high school and before my gap year, I worked in a restaurant in Utrecht. In general, the main goal of my boss was to make as much revenue as possible. During my first working days I was taught how to be a good waiter and what they expected of me. I experienced that I had multiple interest as a waiter. The main goal was to satisfy the guests as good as possible. Nowadays review scores and social media are very important in order to attract new costumers, thus good service is important. The costume...