Yesterday was an umbrella, today the pencil case. What am I going to forget tomorrow? - Personal Reputations: the shameful development of carelessness and straying from it.

Please do not forget your umbrella today. Love, mom. : The unpleasant memory of carelessness.

When I was in my elementary school years, I was famous for losing things to my mom. It was very fortunate that I did not lose valuable things, but I often forgot to bring those trivial things such as umbrella, pencil case, and so on. My mom was somewhat worried about this clumsiness inside me, and made me go to private institutes for concentration, such as Kendo or meditation of Qi. As one can expect, nothing really worked. I guess it was partially because I was not old enough to realize why it was important to fix the carelessness, thus resulting in inefficient results of behaviors. 

This reputation that was only limited to my family began to develop on to my social standing when this continued on my middle school years. I was gradually fixing it by then, but it was not enough to show others that I lost things frequently. This undermined my image, making me shown to others as somewhat irresponsible and careless. The following limitations that came to me due to this degrading of my personal image were quite a lot. But the most serious thing was that I was losing the trust of people on those trivial matters. When the things were actually coming to my skin, I was already in a situation where I lost a large part of my trust, and I felt like I had to do something about it. 

When I got into high school, it was a perfect chance for me to reset my reputation. It was a whole new environment with people not having prior knowledge of my carelessness. Also, I had tried enthusiastically during the middle school years to try to remember things more deliberately, doing things such as writing post it memos for the things I often forget and checking them often while having the memo in my pocket. I had some mistakes made in my high school years, but it was not something serious compared to my elementary and middle school years. My reputation was back on normal track, and I was not too much different from other 'normal' people while I was in my high school years.

However, while fixing this bad habit of mine, I had faced numerous situations where I had to 'cash it in' with my bad reputations. One of the things that I remember was in my middle school years, while I was in the broadcasting team for my school. Since people (including the teachers) knew I was forgetting things a lot, instead of giving me the control of the broadcasting system during the important events such as morning assembly (where the principle of the school came out and gave words to the students, very formal weekly event), I was to give out signs for the people who were actually controlling the machines about when to do what. I had a list of things written down just for that moment, so I guess it looked more safe to the teachers for me to do things instantly then preparing the equipment, which could have caused a lot of trouble if something was missing.

The government's principal-agent problem: turning a public good into a private good, 'Incheon National Airport'.

What is the government's intention: Asymmetrical information and the privatization of 'Incheon National Airport.'

In the year late 2009, South Korean citizens were shocked by government's announcement. The government announced that they would privatize a nation owned airport, Incheon National Airport.' They claimed that the public enterprise had to be further advanced in technology and management, and was planning to sell the 49% share of the airport to foreign enterprise. The background information about the Korea at that time was this: government lacked fund due to a nationwide project called 'Four major rivers project.' (I would not go deep into the project itself at this post. You can find it on wikipedia.org by typing four major rivers project.) Even though 49.9% of the citizens disagreed on implementing the project due to several reasons, such as environmental issues, the funding and the project time, and so on. However, the government proceeded anyways. The project cost around 22 trillion dollars (if the estimate of the Korean won was converted to US dollars) and the government had to make up some money in order to keep the country rolling. 

Majority of the Korean citizens weren't able to understand the government's decision when they claimed that the airport 'will learn the most advanced techniques' from the world's leading enterprise. Incheon national airport was #1 in rankings of Airport Service Quality inspected by Airport Council International. Besides, according to the Incheon airport customs, the airport was making around $9 billion profit in year 2009.

The decision of privatizing a public entity is usually made when that public entity is lacking in performance. Since the deficit of a public entity is filled up by the tax of the taxpayers, or citizens, privatizing a public entity who does not improve in performance would be a good choice for the company to survive in the jungle according to 'survival of the fittest.'

However, the Incheon airport was making a worthwhile profit, and the authority figures of other renowned airports were actually visiting the Incheon airport to learn the techniques and management methods. So the government funding issues were brought into attention by the people. However, our three-legged principle agent model starts here.

Who will take the airport if privatized? What's behind all this?: Suspicious acts of government and the Macquarie group.

**From this point and further, nothing is proved to be true. The facts are only up to an extent, and rest will be my assumptions based on my personal thoughts and viewpoints.**

Another shock came to the people of Korea when further details came into attention by the internet. Macquarie group, who were the closest to buying most of the shares released by the government, had some personal relationships with the president at that time.There were 3 close people who had personal relationships with the president in the Macquarie group Korea, including the nephew of the president who was CEO of the Macquarie IMM.

So the government here is the agent, and the citizens are the principle, who elects the president and the government officials to represent their thoughts to run the country. It is a little bit off the context, but we can see the people related to the president as the third leg, or the customer of the lawyer in the prompt.

The government officials who are elected by voting should serve the citizens who made them be in their spot. However, the u-bar of the agents, or the government officials, are much too big to just sniff and back away. As this information was released on the web, (the newspapers were controlled by the government, thus was unable to report these information. actually, the web was not a sufficient place for gathering information related to this either; most of the information related to Macquarie group at that time on the web was deleted after 5 minutes they were uploaded on the web) people were furious about the not-even-verified fact that the president was using his power and the asymmetrical information that the people gave him to use it for the management of the country.

The situation, however, is not similar to those of ordinary bilateral, or three-legged principal agent situations. People are a part of the country, which the president runs. This means that people does not really have too much authority over the agent that they have hired. The only way to stop the president from running wild is to impeach the president, which is not really an ideal method. Plus, not all people are too interested in the politics. There are a portion of people who are negligent of what is going on with the governmental policies. In other words, compared to our normal principal-agent model, the principal has too less methods to control the agent.

Of course, the situation doesn't see eye to eye between the principle and the agent. The principle does not really care as long as the performance of the agent is in the right path. However, the agent's u-bar, which is the alternative choice that he could take instead of keeping the oath that he made when elected is just too big. If he had done the privatization, and one of the 'hidden action' underlying was due to that u-bar, he would have lost all the trust that he had achieved during his life. And in this case, the principle and the customer of the agent would not want to meet eye to eye. The method that the citizen can use to control the agent would be an mindset of 'we are the owner of the country.' (I hate to say this, but fact is fact; to be honest, Korean's mindset of citizenship is not too high, compared to other countries who are in similar level of economic/social development and welfare.)

This matter, I personally think, is a little bit away from the prompt. However, government officials-laypeople relationship has been one of the most emphasized principle-agent relationships, and the thing just came up into my mind while I was thinking about the prompt. In order to make the input, which is the vote, into output, people would have to have more interest in the politics and have a better mindset as a citizen of a country.