Stand-Up Economist

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  • Chapter 8: Simultaneous-Move Games (pages 89-102)

    Posted 7/09/10

    Summary in haiku form
    Don’t get caught up in
    The prisoners’ dilemma.
    It’s a tragedy!

    Summary in one paragraph
    All games—most obviously games like rock-paper-scissors—can be described using a payoff matrix that lists the players’ strategies and the outcomes of the different strategy combinations. An important game is the prisoners’ dilemma, which is a two-player game in which [...]

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  • Chapter 9: Auctions (pages 103-116)

    Posted 7/08/10

    Summary in haiku form
    If you learn about
    Auction equivalences
    You’ll save time online.

    Summary in one paragraph
    Auctions are used in many important situations (and in less important situations like eBay) because they can help reveal how much something is worth, because they can help prevent collusion, and because they can help sell perishable items fast. There [...]

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  • Chapter 10: From Some to Many (pages 117-126)

    Posted 7/07/10

    Summary in haiku form
    Economists dream
    Of grains of sand on the beach…
    Buyers and sellers.

    Summary in one paragraph
    The strategic complications of game theory disappear when we move to a world of competitive markets in which buyers and sellers are small relative to the market as a whole. This means that buyers and sellers are all [...]

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  • Chapter 11: Supply and Demand (pages 129-142)

    Posted 7/06/10

    Summary in haiku form
    One short phrase explains
    The mystery of prices:
    Supply and demand.

    Summary in one paragraph
    In competitive markets buyers and sellers are all price-takers, i.e., they all take the market price as given; but then where do market prices come from? Economists spend many years debating whether market prices were determined by supply (i.e., [...]

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  • Chapter 12: Taxes (pages 143-154)

    Posted 7/05/10

    Summary in haiku form
    Tax equivalence:
    Where does the tax burden fall?
    Don’t ask a lawyer.

    Summary in one paragraph
    Lawyers determine the legal incidence of taxes—i.e., who formally pays the taxes—but the forces of supply and demand determine the economic incidence of taxes, i.e., who ultimately bears the burden. In fact, the tax equivalence result says that [...]

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  • Chapter 13: Margins (pages 155-168)

    Posted 7/04/10

    Summary in haiku form
    True optimizers
    Don’t want one more or one less.
    Think at the margin.

    Summary in one paragraph
    Supply curves tell us how much sellers want to sell at certain market prices, but they can be reinterpreted as marginal cost curves, which tell us the additional cost of producing one more unit of output. And [...]

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  • Chapter 14: Elasticity (pages 169-180)

    Posted 7/03/10

    Summary in haiku form
    Elasticity:
    Responsiveness to changes.
    How much do you stretch?

    Summary in one paragraph
    Elasticities measure responsiveness, e.g., the price elasticity of demand measures the percentage change in quantity demanded produced by a 1% increase in price. (More generally, the X elasticity of Y measures the percentage change in Y produced by a 1% increase [...]

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  • Chapter 15: The Big Picture (pages 181-192)

    Posted 7/02/10

    Summary in haiku form
    Competition needs
    Lots of tender loving care
    Plus a carbon tax.

    Summary in one paragraph
    Need to add this…
    Notes on specific pages
    Link to Edgeworth Box
    Page 185: Amartya Sen
    Amartya Sen won the 1996 Nobel Prize “for his contributions to welfare economics.”
    Page 189: “Now that’s an idea worthy of a Nobel Prize!”
    Marty Weitzman [...]

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  • Ten observations about conservatives and climate change

    Posted 7/01/10

    1. Conservatives are definitely not going away in the short-term—they are likely to pick up seats this coming November—and they are almost certainly not going away in the long-term either.
    2. Right now most conservatives don’t much care about climate change, but some of them do care. These include local folks like Todd Myers and national [...]

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  • Chapter 16: Conclusion (pages 193-204)

    Posted 7/01/10

    Summary in haiku form
    Is the big question
    Still unanswered in your mind?
    Study more econ.

    Summary in one paragraph
    Need to add this…
    Notes on specific pages
    Page 198: Ken Arrow, Gerard Debreu, and the “Invisible Hand Theorems”
    Ken Arrow shared the 1972 Nobel Prize (with John Hicks) “for their pioneering contributions to general economic equilibrium theory and welfare [...]

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