During Tuesday's lecture, Professor Coppock mentioned that UVA faculty leadership had historically been terrified to even acknowledge Lou's List, despite its popularity among students and faculty. UVA finally adopted it last Fall, but as an official university service, it somehow is not as good as the version Lou operated by himself. This made me wonder why large institutions use unpopular internal systems when better alternatives exist. A boring explanation is that UVA maintains over 100 functional specialists to manage its compliance requirements, and the specialists recommend generic safe enterprise software like Oracle Peoplesoft.
A far more interesting explanation is Olson's theory of collective action. He argues that small organized groups have an advantage over larger groups because their members have stronger incentives to pursue a common interest. Larger groups, by contrast, struggle to organize due to the free rider problem, unless they offer selective incentives to encourage participation. Oracle has millions of dollars at stake in securing institutional contracts, giving it a strong incentive to lobby for government technology spending. Students and faculty, despite being far more numerous, are classified as a latent group because while they have vast collective power, they also have little individual incentive to organize around university software decisions, despite the inconvenience each member faces.
Maybe if our students and faculty had a better selective incentive to rally behind, Lou's List would have been integrated into UVA's official services sooner, and without the issues present in Hoos' List. Unfortunately, the better course registration experience apparently was not a strong enough incentive on its own.
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