Tuesday, February 8, 2011

Flight of Fancy - Market Price for Courses

So it turns out I’m not entirely crazy.

Obviously, one of the benefits of going on exchange is to meet new people and learn from new experiences. Previously, I had posted on a flight of fancy, where I wondered what would happen if we extended the idea of our bidding system at Rotman to the “next level”. Well it turns out that elective bidding at some other schools can be slightly more complicated.

Talking to some students at other MBA schools, they have more “progressive” (market driven, while not entirely "pure") bidding systems for courses, where you can actually buy and sell courses for a profit (expressed as a gain in “points”) where you bid for classes early and then “sell” them at a later date when their point value has increased.

The only short coming of their system (from a market perspective) is that there is only one form of “liquidity”. The only way to truly “exit” the market? Take a course. There is no other way to liquidate these points. This could easily be solved if you could simply transfer the points to another student (a secondary market would develop and even create an OTC market price in $$$'s for course points).

And then you would have a market answer for the question: “How much is the margin worth to take the elective course you want?”

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