Suppose the Campus gave (this means there is no additional charge for receiving the allocation) each student an allocation of "Illinibucks" which could be used for the sole purpose of moving to the head of the line. Use of the Illinibucks would occur at a pre-specified price set by the campus. What sort of thing would be a candidate for this? How would you spend your Illinibucks? What issues would arise if the administered price was too low? too high?
The best candidate for this system would be course registration, since all students need to fulfill a certain amount of required and elective classes I think the Illinibucks concept could be useful in that it would provide a better signal of the demand for courses, and would allow students to better quantify their preferences. If students were able to "cut the line" at a certain price then it would help to make the registration process a little more fair. For example, look at a class like ECON 203. Several business majors require ECON 203 in order to take higher level classes, as well as the Economics students. While the university provides both a large class size and three offerings for it, it is still a highly demanded class, to which those majors get first dibs at registering for. At the time I tried to register, I was not yet an economics major so I had a very difficult time registering for this class. Since it was a highly demanded class, had I been able to use the Illinibucks system, I most likely would have used all my Illinibucks to cut the line and get into the class. I think that high demand core classes, like ECON 203, would benefit from this because it would allow students who really need to get into the core class to do so, while providing the incentive for students who may not need to take it right away to use their Illinibucks to get into a highly demanded elective.
Additionally it would provide a better signal as to what the student body needs offered that particular year. If the price is set correctly, and a greater deal more of people would decide to spend their Illinibucks on a class, then the department would know exactly how many excess students want to take the class and then be able to decide if offering another section would be the best remedy. Furthermore, it allows the students to add a quantitative value to how they register for their classes by "budgeting" how they would spend their Illinibucks, they would be able to prioritize which classes they absolutely need to take first and which ones that semester were less important. This provides a considerable benefit to the student because it would grant them some certainty that their wants and needs would be met by the university and refocus course selection on student interests rather than scheduling requirements. However, I suspect that this would be rather prone to "strategizing" where students would strategically pick the classes they need instead of displaying their true preferences, unless the mechanism for distributing the seats in a class would incentivize them to rank according to their real preferences. I know that if I were in this situation, I would spend my Illinibucks on the classes that I anticipated to have the highest demand, especially the sections at the best available times. There are always classes that will limit your schedule, so for me to be able to cut in line for a class that fits my most ideal schedule would be the best case scenario.
I think the biggest problem with the Illinibucks system would be how the prices would be determined. In order to set the price, the University would have to set the supply and then estimate the demand accordingly so that the students who use their Illinibucks would get into the classes they need. On one hand, if the price was too high, then students wouldn't use their bucks and would most likely not even try to register since the high price would indicate to them that it is highly demanded. On the other hand, if the price were too low, then there would be a very big problem. Students would use their Illinibucks and then be faced with the dilemma of either an overcrowded classroom or not getting into the class. This would upset quite a few students because they would feel that they wasted their Illinibucks. If potentially students could place bids and then the price be set, they would be able to get a better estimation of what students would be willing to spend their Illinibucks on.
You've written about the prompt for next week. This week the prompt was about well functioning teams. I'll respond below to what you wrote. Next week please write about the prompt on teams.
ReplyDeleteOne of the issues you didn't address in your post is that if were able to cut into the line with your Illinibucks then who would get bumped out of the line as a result (or forced to move to the back of the line)? It may be there is some inefficiency in people who want into a class not being able to get in. Might there be some additional inefficiency about people currently in a class but who shouldn't be taking it?
The airlines sometimes overbook flights because they try to fly a plane that is full of passengers and they get no shows for a variety of reasons. (The most benign is that the connecting flight was delayed so that passenger needs to take a later flight.) Sometimes everybody with a ticket does show up and then the airline needs a way to get volunteers to take a later flight. The offer a reward for doing that. If most people stick with the current flight, but a few are willing to fly later, that willingness demonstrates they are the right people to get bumped.
Taking this back into the course registration scenario, one wonders if somebody already registered for the class might sell there seat and earn additional Illinibucks that way. If not that, how would the Illinibucks work on a class that is already maxed out?