Class of 2013

***Updated 5/11*** (Sorry Jesse and Clay!)
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Tomorrow one of my favorite groups of students ever will take the big step across the stage wearing funny costumes and enter the next phase of their lives.  I will miss each and every one of them.

I've had the privilege and honor of teaching every member of this year's Applied Social Science graduating class in at least one course (and sometimes half a dozen different ones), and will be forever grateful to them for bearing with our growing pains (they will be the first class to really go through the program as it was intended and have all been at Stout for as long or longer than the program has been in existence), pushing us to improve, showing us what was possible for our students to achieve, and ultimately, reminding us why we love our jobs.

A few memories I have of each of our graduates (and a few pictures I could scare up)

Crowd-sourcing everyday decisions

For once I'm going to actually keep it (relatively) short with a blog post.  I recently stumbled across this new smartphone app called "Seesaw" which allows you to crowd-source your everyday decisions.

I'm kind of fascinated by this for a couple of reasons, but mostly I'm thinking about it because I spend every day teaching students how to model decision making using economic theory, and I'm realizing that (outside of some game theory and public choice topics) there is very little economic theory that I am teaching them that is capable of modeling this increasing area of decision making in modern societies and economies.

From Kickstarter crowd-sourcing new investment decisions to Facebook polls and Qualtrics surveys, increasingly our decision making is becoming data-driven and crowd-driven.  Traditional "cost-benefit analysis" type models are taking a back seat to (what I would generally consider the lazier version of decision making) just asking other people to decide for us.