Motivation is the Key to College Success

Source: Office Vibe

The economic principle I’m exploring is because of scarcity, people choose. All choices have an opportunity cost. My research question to help me study the economic principle is “Which factors lead to greater college success?"

The article published in “Root cause for college student success?” demonstrates this economic principle by arguing/showing that there are many choices in college but some will provide more benefit than others.

First, it is important to know that the success of college students and their career satisfaction is tied to high school career exploration. This is due to the fact that most students are taught to explore while in college and are told to broaden their perspectives in order to diversify their options for the future. While this may be the correct route for some students, other students have proved to be highly successful by exploring their interests and by choosing a career while in high school. This usually results in no changing majors and an on-time graduation. Students seem to be more focused if they have a clear vision for their future. It makes sense that the students with demonstrated talents and interests will more easily create a path for achieving career goals.

Second, according to the Higher Learning Commission, “motivation is the leading cause behind students’ failure or success in completing schoolwork.” Motivation influences student’s attitudes, study habits, academic readiness, and so on.” Motivation has definitely allowed lack of motivation has proven to lead more students to failure. If you have no idea where you are going, it will likely be extremely difficult to get there.

Third, passion has proved to lead students to success, while lack of passion has proven to lead more students to failure. According to executive leadership development coach Carl Nielsonursuing, “pursuing a bachelor’s degree requires passion, determination, the drive to overcome “hurdles,” and a willingness to do “whatever it takes” to achieve their goal.” Later on he states that students who don’t understand how specific courses Many students determine if a course is on the critical path to their ultimate goal before they even step foot in the classroom, these same people are likely the ones that believe education means little due to the lack of connection between what they study and their lives. With the rising student debt and average time to complete an undergraduate degree, it is important to determine effective ways to utilize college in order to maximize success and efficiency. It appears that many people and professionals believe that motivation lies at the root of college success. Students who passionately engage in academics are way more likely to flourish because they are motivated, interested, prepared, willing to put in the work, and probably set goals beforehand.

In my next blog post, I will research the question: “Which jobs are more beneficial to college students?”

How mobile games incentivize their advertising.

The economic principle I’m exploring is “incentivization”

My research question to help me study the economic principle is: How do game developers incentivize advertisements?

A method developers use incentives in their game is in the way they use advertisements. As of 2017, around 75.5% of IOS and Andriod mobile games have in-app advertisements, in a mobile games industry that made $5.5 billion in 2016. A large portion of these games that use advertising also incentivizes that advertising.

Many games will give players the option to watch video-ads for in-game currency that often you would otherwise need to spend money to get, though the amount of currency you receive is usually low and there are often caps to how much you can get daily. By incentivizing the users to actively engage with the advertisements, it makes sure that the money spent to create those advertisements won’t be entirely wasted because the player doesn't see it, a constant worry for advertisers who put up banners in games. Further, the rewarded currency can allow quicker progression through games entirely designed to get you drawn in and addicted, then create a wall where, without said currency, further progression can take absurd amounts of time. This form of “freemium” game means the user will continuously watch more adds so they can more quickly progress without spending money.

Another way games try to create incentivize advertisements is by creating “offer-walls”. These are lists of entirely different apps that the app will reward the user for downloading. While seemingly harmless as the user could delete the app right after and still receive the reward, it creates false and misleading statistics for the advertised games which can be used by the developers to lure investors in.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/more-marketers-offer-incentives-for-watching-ads-1451991600 https://www.psychguides.com/interact/the-psychology-of-freemium/ https://www.appsflyer.com/blog/rewarded-advertising-2017-good-bad-ugly/ https://www.wepc.com/news/video-game-statistics/#gaming-video-content-market

Big Steaming Services Don't Pay Artists

The economic principle I’m exploring is Institutions are the “rules of the game” that influence choices.


My research question to help me study the economic principle is What are the economics of Pandora, Spotify, and other streaming services for newer vs more established artists?

The article published in Digital Music News and The Verge titled “What Streaming Music Services Pay” and “Spotify's Year in Music shows just how little we pay artists for their music” demonstrates this economic principle by arguing/showing despite having more paid subscriptions or popularity, some streaming music services won’t pay artist much at all.

Digital Music News

As we discussed in my last blog post, YouTube is maybe not the best for paying artist, but a great way to start in the music industry. This made me curious and decided to look at other streaming services to see how they compare. What I found was remarkable! “Spotify and YouTube, arguably the largest streaming music services, had the worst payouts.”


I would have never thought Spotify, just like YouTube, didn’t pay their artist that much. “Last year,{2017} the service paid out $0.0038 per play. Not much has changed this year{2018}. With a reported 51.51% market share in the US, Spotify pays $0.00397 per stream.” And what surprised me more is that Napster and Groove Music (aka Xbox Music) have the highest payout to artists, but lowest streaming numbers. “Though it ranked the highest on this list, it had the lowest streaming music market share of 0.65%.“ How are companies that have the highest number of revenue have the lowest payout to artists and vice-versa?


So I went around looking for answers to this question and found that Spotify uses a complex formula to determine the royalties artists earn from streams. Major labels likely receive a sizable sum from Spotify, but not all of that money is going to artists. As said in article titled “Spotify's Year in Music shows just how little we pay artists for their music” published by The Verge “Not all artists get the same cut of Spotify revenue either: depending on their contracts with the label, some musicians might only recoup 15 to 20 percent of the streaming revenue they brought in. Other factors also come into play too, like the country in which a song was streamed and the currency value in that country. “Still, Spotify admits the average "per stream" payout to rights holders lands somewhere between $0.006 and $0.0084.”


“Here’s what that means for me. My top artist of the year was Built to Spill, whose songs (mostly from There's Nothing Wrong with Love) I streamed 267 times over the course of 2015. Using the upper limit of Spotify’s estimated payout, that would be 267 x .0084, which means I paid Built to Spill somewhere around $2.24 for an entire year of music. And that $2.24 is distributed among the music's "rights holders," which includes labels and publishers.” said Lizzie Plaugic, a Spotify user and author of this article. That means that the artists get almost nothing compared to the other big artist like Drake which racks in $15 million on Spotify with his 1.8 billion streams.


This is like getting the rich more richer and the poor more poorer. I don’t think that is fair. As discussed in the YouTube blog post, this makes smaller artist have to go out and make other business plus do live concerts to try to make a living profit.


Napster and Groove Music don’t have to pay as many other bills because they are not so big and can pay the artist more than the other companies. Plus, they don’t have that complex formula as Spotify does making they the highest payout companies out there. On the downside, they don’t get that many steams and something loses money which can make companies go out of business like Groove Music is in 2019. “With few users lining up behind the service, the company just couldn’t compete against established market leaders.”


“Much has already been said about how little Spotify pays artists and how unsustainable the current streaming model is for artists. Unless this model changes or labels take a smaller cut of the profits, the numbers will remain minuscule for smaller artists.”

The Changing Market for Fanfiction

amazon.com

Institutions are the “rules of the game” that influence choices.
     How is the market for fanfiction changing?
           The articles I used are Comicverse.com(Is there a market for fanfiction) by Amanda Michalak and Wired.com(Publishers are warming to fanfiction) by Rachel Edidin. They both talk about the shift that publishers have taken, from disregarding fanfiction as strange and unprofessional, to seeing the potential in the writers and the profits. 

           Publishers have taken a notice of fanfiction and the amount of potential writers and ideas that come from it. Edidin says that “Literary publishing's uneasy relationship with fan fiction has been complicated by the realization that fandom is a huge potential market—one stocked with both prolific authors and enthusiastic readers.” With this new door of opportunity, we get books like “50 shades of grey” by E.L. James and “After” by Anna Todd. The only problem… copyright. With publishers publishing fanfiction the problem resides in renaming everyone, taking out parts of the story because it’s too much like the original or talks too much about its plot. The effort, and the social stigma that I mentioned before, may be too much of a con for some publishers. But others, like “Big Bang successfully raised over $50,000 on Kickstarter in November to fund its first wave of books.” (Edidin) This could be an indicator that the flood gates are opening and the only wall separating writers from fanfiction writers is coming down.

          “Fanfiction is mostly published pseudonymously, and the stigma surrounding it often causes writers to keep their professional and fan identities carefully compartmentalized.”(Edidin) With the slow moving waves to getting rid of that stigma, writers from everywhere will be taken more seriously and more books will be published. Instead of fanfiction being free online, writers will actually get a chance to put their name out there. Readers will get a chance to see themselves on the mainstream, not just under scrutiny and unrecognized. Fanfiction will get its roots in the ground and become another from of professional writing that people can enjoy and support those writers. Fandoms give writers a chance at being appreciated for their work.

         Amazon has also made way for fanfiction to be out there without the problem of copyright. It has created a way for fandoms to write fanfiction for money and not sacrifice any details. How? Amazon and certain authors are working together by giving fans permission to write about their characters and settings. This gives way to whole new level of fanfiction writing. No one is punished for making it, but actually encouraged to.

 “With websites that allow readers to view their works for free, there is no dispute over copyright because the authors are not making a profit from somebody else’s characters, worlds, or lives. Kindle Worlds is the only resource for fanfiction authors to publish their works in “print” form without sacrificing certain details of their work.” (Michalak) 

With this the creation of fanfiction will be less stigmatized. Writers will get their name out there, and readers will get their alternate endings and interactions and expansions of the universes they love.

Tech advancements for the Deaf?

www.americahears.com

The economic principle I’m exploring is “People Gain When They Trade Voluntarily”

 My research question to help me study the economic principle is “In what ways have the Deaf adapted over the years?”

 The article published in The Limping Chicken titled “Five recent technological advances that are changing deaf people’s lives” demonstrates this economic principle by showing several different technological advancements in the Deaf culture like, the Convo light app and, Google Glass.

 First, the Convo light app is an app that flickers your houslights when you get an alert on your mobile phone. This is obviously helpful if you can’t hear the ringer go off. I has also been used as a doorbell and an alarm clock for the Deaf and hard of hearing.

 Second, several new pieces of wearable tech like the Google glass have been beneficial to Deaf people. The Google Glass was designed to display things on the inside of the lense which would have allowed Deaf people to read some of the information being filtered in. Recently, Apple has started transcribing voicemails. It’s a little bit unreliable but it’s better than nothing.

 Third, there are newer and better hearing aids becoming cheaper on the market. This is helpful because in the past, hearing aids and other hearing devices have been crazy expensive so they were not widely available. With more people having less restricted access to these devices, communication is becoming much easier.

 In my next blog post I will research the question: Why is there a difference of opinion on CI in the Deaf community?

How game publishers make money off of "premium" editions and pre-orders.

Principle: People generally respond to incentives in predictable ways.

Question: How do companies make money off of “Advanced” editions and pre-orders.

Through the 2000’s, Pre-orders were commonplace for any major game release, especially console exclusives. A pre-order is when a consumer purchases a game before it is released, essentially making a claim on a copy before anyone without pre-orders does. Pre-orders were originally created to solve a problem for gamers, who wanted to get a game as soon as possible without having to risk their local store running out of copies before they got through the often hours-long lines. While this ensured gamers a copy of their most anticipated games, because they spent their money before the game was finished, no reviews are available to educate the consumer whether or not the game is worth the usual $60 price point. Trying to further incentivize gamers into separating from their money early, developers often create “pre-order bonuses”. These give items, content, or other exclusives to gamers who bought the game early. Publishers love pre-orders as they help ensure they make a profit without having to risk more investment money to ensure game quality. It also makes it hard for publishers to justify delaying a game to fix the game as people might demand their money back. Because of this, some publishers have become notorious for releasing buggy, glitched, unfinished games that could take months to fix with post-release patches, while having massive pre-order bonuses. This problem has been exacerbated by the now dominant online market, which negates the original benefit of the pre-order.

Game publishers also create “advanced” or “premium” editions of games, where they would charge an increased price for exclusive items and content that were only available with the purchase of that edition. While the bonuses gamers could receive were usually either progression boosts, extra items, or exclusive items, some games would cut sections out of the original game to put into either a pre-order bonus, advanced edition, or a DLC (downloadable content) which are usually developed after the game is released to keep gamers interested and playing.

While the creation of “premium editions” are still rampant in the gaming markets, EA being a particularly notorious example, the number of people who buy pre-orders has decreased because of the increasing popularity of online digital download platforms like Steam. While you can still pre-order a digital copy of a game, there is much less incentive to since the original benefit of the pre-order no longer applies, and gamers are getting increasingly frustrated with the shady practices of publishers who release broken games for the sake of profit.

https://www.svg.com/125676/reasons-you-should-never-preorder-a-game/ https://www.wepc.com/news/video-game-statistics/#gaming-video-content-market
https://gamerant.com/video-game-preorders-stats/

The Open Dialogue System

The economic principle I’m exploring is “Institutions are ‘the rules of the game’ that influence choices”

Source: discovermainstream.com

My research question to help me study the economic principle is “What are other countries’ systems for mental illness?”

The article published in ABC News Australia titled “Open Dialogue: Finland's alternative approach to mental illness” analyzes other countries’ methods for treatment of mental illness, specifically Finland and Australia.

Finland has created a new system they call the Open Dialogue system. The Open Dialogue system was created when a Finnish child was diagnosed with psychosis, and his mother sought to find a treatment without immediately going to medication or hospitalization. Open Dialogue therapy is a form of group therapy with health professionals and the patient’s family and friends that works with the patient to help them find solutions in their life. The system seeks to do what other forms of treatment does not, which is more personally analyzing those with mental health issues rather than grouping them into a category of depression, anxiety, or the like and treating all patients in each category similarly. Open Dialogue isn’t against traditional medication or hospitals, but it serves as a layer of defense that allows mental illness to be recognized and understood before medicating the patient. This system is widely used in all of Finland and is being adopted in Australia, specifically for patients of psychosis and schizophrenia, but it’s beginning to be used for all mental illnesses.

 The Open Dialogue system is a solution to many of the problems that the American system already has. As mentioned in the last post, the US lacks an early intervention system for mental illness, which Open Dialogue is. The system makes it easier to identify mental illness before it results in a severe incident. Unlike some other treatment options, Open Dialogue recognizes the importance of bettering the health of the patient, or it at least shows that it does more than other treatment options. I think America should begin to implement the Open Dialogue system because it seems to be a solution that many people could benefit from. There are a lot of people that hesitate medicating mental illness, so Open Dialogue could assess the severity of the illness and make people more at ease with medication, or find a treatment option without it.