Paul Milgrom Econ 490 Fall 2019

In the movie "The Social Network", director David Fincher explore the origins of the social media company Facebook, at Harvard and chronicles the early years of the company. Co founders, Mark Zuckerberg and Eduardo Saverin seem to be good friends and have a good professional relationship starting out. They start off with Eduardo giving Mark a $1000 dollars so that he can make the initial site titled "Thefacebook". It starts off at just a few top tier universities, limited to just college students. Their site proves to be pretty popular, as it's being talked around campuses quite a bit. They later meet with the co-founder of Napster, Sean Parker, giving them some advice on how to expand their company and have a greater reach beyond universities. Saverin has a bit of disdain about Parker, and objects to many of the business decisions that he was making for the company. For example they accepted $500,000 from the investor Peter Thiel (who is also the founde...

I believe that punishments can have their place here or there, but I often find that people take these a little too far sometimes. From what I recall, the president of my fraternity reprimanded our vice president of finance for losing track on some of our funds that we had allocated for our formal dance that was upcoming. The person in authority did appear to be a little hostile towards the member while disciplining them. The president had raised a voice quite a bit and was practically yelling. The receiving member just stood there, quite unsure of what to say in the moment and seemingly not wanting to make the other person more upset by talking.  They did show how the problem was to be fixed though, just in an angry demeanor. The president frequently described it as unacceptable and unbecoming of him and things of the sort. I thought his words were a little harsh, and did not accept the way he was taking care of the problem. It definitely was not the most productive way to...

I found that these articles were quite interesting to read. Regarding the fairness and game theory for children, I never realized how skewed the perception of fairness may be quite different for children as opposed to adults. They think that, if someone has something they want and that they do not have, they may want to equally split it as they view that as morally fair.  Reading that how through continuing research that these may be an innate quality that we have wanted since our beginnings as a species does put things into a new light though. If we examine that scarcity is the underlying problem of possibly most economic issues, then we see that everyone equaling sharing something is fairer as opposed to one person simply hoarding something.  While most of us may want things to be fair, that is simply not the way the world works. But rather than simply suppressing it, it may however prove beneficial to work within the constraints of a child like's view of fairness. ...