Event Planning & Network Effects
Being a member of organizations can be extremely beneficial towards a holistic education. However, this benefit comes with the frequent responsibility of event planning. In my instance, I was given the task of organizing a 50-person trip to a Buffalo Bills game. Because of the expenses that arise when planning such a trip—Tickets, Transportation, food/drinks—it was easy to see before planning that a co-pay requirement would be needed, and it is within this co-pay that our network market was created.
I used the knowledge of network effects to weigh my options when choosing what would be an appropriate co-pay, while minimizing the amount of next semester’s budget we would need to reallocate. I imagined that, because the interconnectivity of the organization, there would be many weak ties with different sets of strong ties within. So, in the event that one member was not able to attend, this may further convince additional members to drop-out, leading to a cascade of withdrawals and a failure of the trip.
In conclusion, I used my best judgment to imagine what the likely reservation price range would be for this trip, and place the co-pay at this imagined maximize—$25.