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The table below shows the "outside" readings for Trandel's
ECON 2106H class.
For now, all of the readings are found through direct links.
Later in the semester, some readings might be accessed through
the course-reserves system on the UGA Libraries web page.
| Find It |
Citation |
Economic Concepts |
Comments |
|
Exam I Readings |
direct link
(html) |
"If God Were an Accountant ...: Whose Life Is Worth More,
A Drug Dealer or a Prostitute"
by Tim Harford.
Slate.
April 28, 2007.
|
limited resources,
trade offs |
In a world with limited resources, regulatory policies
that "save lives" also have a cost -- they use resources
that could instead be devoted to satisfying other wants and
desires (including other types of life-saving regulations).
To make intelligent safety/regulatory decisions, therefore,
a society must somehow compare various alternatives.
While some people might claim that a life is "priceless",
that can't really be true -- we aren't willing to pay
the cost needed to (for example) reinforce cars to such
an extent that nobody ever dies in an auto accident.
Saving a life must thus have a monetary "value" (less than
infinity) that can be compared to the cost of a regulation.
This article briefly discusses the idea of using people's
own actions and decisions to assign a monetary value to a
life (or to one additional year of life). The article
also points out that once we have estimated the value of
life, we can estimate the gain produced by improvements
over time in life span.
|
direct link
(html) |
"Where the Buses Run on Time"
by Austan Goolsbee.
Slate.
March 16, 2006.
|
incentives |
Differences in incentives -- in this case in how bus drivers in
Chile are paid -- influence the behavior of those drivers. In
this particular case, the form of pay that is based more closely on
"productivity" produces generally favorable results (although there
are a couple negative side effects). As the author notes,
perhaps more employment contracts should be written in ways that
provide inentives for desirable behavior.
|
direct link
(html) |
"The Fruits of Their Labors"
by Tim Harford.
Slate.
August 23, 2008.
|
incentives |
This piece also looks how people's behavior responds to differences
in how they are paid. In this case, "experiments" were
conducted by using differing pay systems -- for both workers and
managers -- at a fruit farm in Great Britian. The pay schemes
originally used tended to encourage certain non-productive behaviors.
Implementing new payment methods led to substantial increases in
worker productivity. The results also indicated that the
ability to increase their earnings motivated people to assign tasks,
and to group themselves together, in ways that differed from what
would have existed in the absense of a financial incentive.
|
direct
link
(html)
|
"Economic Scene: The Rapidly Changing Signs at the Gas
Station Show Markets at Work"
by Hal R. Varian.
New York Times,
August 24, 2006. |
opportunity cost
(and topics we'll
cover later) |
The first half of this column presents an argument that
is entirely based on opportunity cost reasoning (although
the author doesn't actually use the term). To see this,
think about the author's description of the choice to be made
by a gasoline-storage-tank owner. [Some of the other
issues addressed in the column -- the role of price in allocating
gasoline and the role of speculators -- are related to
supply-and-demand issues we'll cover later in the semester.]
|
direct link
(html)
|
"Economic Scene: When it comes to books, Internet
selling has not led to uniformly low prices",
by Virginia Postrel.
New York Times,
September 11, 2003. |
demand, elasticity |
This piece is a little dated, but I still like it because of
the way it explicitly gives the figures needed to compute
(both price and cross-price) elasticities. [The author
also explains a bit about how such numbers were computed.]
Specifically, this column looks at how the sales made by various
on-line booksellers responded to price changes. One point
worth noting is the author's comment on the link between
how consumers respond to a price rise and how that price
rise affects total spending (or revenue). [Sounds like
class, right?] Here are a few
additional issues. How was Amazon able to make their
customers more "loyal"? Does it sound like Amazon would
be able to maintain that customer loyalty, and how would doing
so affect Amazon's profitablity? Finally, is it likely that
other Web-based book sellers would ever be especially
profitable?
|
direct
link
(html)
|
"Why People Believe Weird Things About Money"
by Michael Shermer.
January, 2008. |
behavioral
economics |
This article describes some of the factors that seem to
systematically affect human decision making, and make those
decisions less "rational" than they might be. In particular,
people are influenced by factors such as aversion to losses,
regret, framing, and norms of fairness. Those who design
policy programs, for example, will find it important to
understand such motivations, and the field of economics has
increasingly emphasized this sort of analysis. [Of all
the material written on behaviorial economicsm, one of the
reasons I particularly like this short piece is that it also
describes situations in which standard economic theory does
successfully describe behaviors -- certain animal behaviors
as as well human actions. In particular, note how
some researchers have investigated the preferences of capuchin
monkeys. One could probably draw a monkey's indifference
curves, right?]
|
direct
link
(pdf) |
"Helping Americans Save -- Testimony of Richard H. Thaler"
by Richard H. Thaler
Testimony before the
Joint Economic Committee
of the U.S. Senate and U.S. House
March 10, 2004.
|
behavioral
economics |
This piece provides more information about a plan -- which I
briefly described in class -- designed to lead to increased
rates of savings. The plan's designers, taking account of
how people seem to make actual decisions, created a method that
made it "easier" for people to save. To what extent did the
savings decisions of workers who participated in the plan differ
(over the long run) from those of their co-workers?
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ECON 2106H
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