Transfer pricing & Illinibucks
I assume that students
have to pay at least the pre-specified price to move to the head of the line.
In this case, there is another problem. What if multiple students pay for the
same pre-specified price? In my opinion, one reason students use
Illinibuck is that they are in a hurry. Starting a second round to see which
student pays higher will cost too much time. Therefore, if multiple students
pay for the price, only the first one can move to the head of the line. Other
students can choose to either get their Illinibucks back or get into the place
according to when the student uses Illinibuck. For example, if the student is
the second to use Illinibuck, he or she will be right behind of the head of the
line. In order to implement this feature, the place uses Illinibucks should
have a online queue system. Students are ranked by the time they queue, and the
time they use Illinibucks. Students who use Illinibucks will get a fixed
position and a mark on their name, so other students can decide whether they
should use Illinibucks or not.
Every day, there are
many students go to see advisors, and school departments have the network and
computers to implement the online queue system, so queuing for advisor will be
a good candidate for Illinibucks. Students in a hurry can use Illinibucks to
cut down the waiting time. Faculty member can use the queue online to determine
if advisers can manage to see all the students in the queue considering the rest
of working hours. If not, they can close the queue online so that students come
after this will not waste their time waiting.
In terms of how I will
spend my Illinibucks, if the pre-specified price is higher than the value I
want to pay, I will not use my Illinibucks. For example, If there are already
many students who used Illinibucks on queuing, and I can't shorten my waiting
time a lot, I will not spend my Illinibucks. If the thing cost a lot of
Illinibucks and it is not that important to me, I will not spend my
Illinibucks.
If the administered
price is too low, most of the students will use their Illinibucks, which would
probably lead to the line staying the same as before, because in my implementation of Illinibucks, if multiple students pay the price, it will end up with first come first serve again. So in this case, most of the students waste
their Illinibucks. In addition, with too many students using Illinibucks at the same time, it will be pretty hard for faculty members to manage the line, and will probably turn into a
big mess.
If the administered
price is too high, most of the students will not spend their Illinibucks. Since
students are often very busy during semester, they will probably forget the
whole Illinibucks thing soon, and this Illinibucks project will be a waste of
time and money to the university.
You spent a lot of the post on the queueing and pricing of the Illinibucks itself. I wish you had written more about the underlying resource that congests. Your example was seeing an advisor. Is student demand for that uniform all year round or are there certain time periods where demand is higher? If the latter, then there is what economists call a peak load demand problem. Assuming overall capacity can't expand much at all, the efficient solution requires moving some of the demand off peak. How might that work?
ReplyDeleteNow I'm going to guess that much of the visits students make to see an advisor is to get their program of courses they intend to take approved. If that's right, that demand can be readily predicted. Then within the time window for when these meetings with the advisor occur, do most students want to have them earlier or later? I don't know that, but maybe you do. You should then ask whether some of the demand can be moved to the less popular time.
There may also be meetings with advisors that are unrelated to course registration. I would divide those into emergencies and necessary but non-emergencies. Emergencies require immediate attention. Non-emergencies can be dealt with later. If there is non-emergency demand for advisor time during the same time window when students want to see advisors about course registration, can that demand be moved entirely to either earlier or later so as not to contribute to the peak demand?
If you did this sort of analysis first, you can then ask whether an Illibucks solution might help make the system function more efficiently or not.
I think first few weeks of semester might have higher demand for seeing an advisor. To move some demands, department can put hold on students who have never seen an adiviser in the current semester. This will force some students seeing advisor early.
DeleteIf the topic of the meeting is unrelated to academic stuff, I think the department can guide those students to the right place such as counseling center. In terms of non-emergencies, this is the perfect time to use Illnibucks to prioritize those students with course registration problems.