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Harold Demsetz

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Harold Demsetz is a Professor of Economics at UCLA and one of the pioneers of New Institutional Economics. Demsetz was born in Chicago in 1930, and received a BA degree from the University of Illinois in 1953, MBA (1954) and Ph.D. (1959) degrees from Northwestern University. He chaired UCLA' s Department of Economics from 1978 through 1980. From 1984 to 1995, he held the Arthur Andersen UCLA Alumni Chair in Business Economics and Directed UCLA's Business Economics program.  His works are focused on property rights, the business firm, problems in monopoly, competition, and antitrust. He has also published work on bioeconomics. The article he co-authored, Production, Information Costs, and Economic Organization , was selected by the American Economic Association as one of the 25 most important papers published in the 100 year history of the AER. The paper analyzes the firm as an economic entity and looks at relationships within and outside of the firm. His third book,  T
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Roommate Opportunism

At the beginning of this year, I moved into my new apartment with 3 friends. I was mistaken regarding the data which the semester started, and I ended up on campus a week earlier than my other roommates. Another one of my roommates was even more confused, and ended up moving in a day earlier than I did. However, my roommate chose one of the smaller and seemingly less desirable rooms in which to live. As a result, I was able to claim the largest room for myself. I thought this was odd, and confronted him about it. It turns out that he preferred the natural sunlight that lit up the room to extra space that he most likely would not use.  In this case, my roommate acted in a way that he thought was opportunistic and I did not, due to our differing preferences. Where I preferred to have the biggest room, he preferred the room lit with natural sunlight and a beautiful view. One way to have allocated rooms effectively was for all of my roommates to have ranked our room preferences and reba
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Organizational Change

This past summer, I was an intern with a tech company that had grown rapidly and experienced hugely negative media scrutiny and significant turmoil. When I joined, it looked like things were beginning to settle down. Then, the CEO resigned about three weeks after I had started my internship. The company was rudderless for a short period, until a leadership committee was appointed to run the day-to-day operations. This was a strange leadership structure from my point of view. If a group is tasked with making crucial decisions, there can often be gridlock. The transaction costs of group decision making are higher than if an individual chooses. Fortunately, the rest of the company was well organized. Most tactical decisions were made by city operations teams, which were able to function without executive approval. These city teams were in turn managed by regional teams, which decided how to invest and compete across five regions. Through this decentralized structure, the organization wa
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